Economic and ecological systems are closely interlinked at a global and a regional level, offering a broad variety of challenging research topics in environmental and resource economics. The successful identification of key questions for current and future research supports development of novel...

The promotion of US energy efficiency policy is seen as a very important activity by the Energy Information Agency (EIA). Generally, the level of energy efficiency of a state is approximated by energy intensity, commonly calculated as the ratio of energy use to GDP. However, energy intensity is...

China is one of the largest consumers of energy globally. The country also emits some of the highest levels of CO2 globally. In 2009, 18% of the world’s total energy was consumed in China and the growth rate of energy consumption in China is 6.4% per year. In recent years, the Chinese...

In this paper we estimate the long- and short-run price elasticities of residential electricity consumption in Switzerland from a household survey by constructing an index of the stock of household appliances as well as by using energy services. We create the index by aggregating the information...

Energy efficiency policy is seen as a very important activity by almost all policy makers. In practical energy policy analysis, the typical indicator used as a proxy for energy efficiency is energy intensity. However, this simple indicator is not necessarily an accurate measure given changes in...

In this paper, we measure the energy efficiency in residential energy consumption using a panel dataset comprised of 40,246 observations from US households observed over 1997-2009. We fit a stochastic frontier model of the minimum input of energy needed to meet the level of energy services...

Models of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, particularly those with an ex- plicit abatement technology, often involve that pollution becomes negative in the long run. This, of course, is a highly implausible prediction. The paper at hand examines the problem of negative pollution by, ¯rst,...

Since Sachs and Warner's (1995a) contribution, there has been a lively debate on the so-called natural resource curse. This paper re-examines the effects of natural resource abundance on economic growth using new measures of resource endowment and considering the role of institutional quality....

We critically evaluate the empirical basis for the so-called resource curse and find that, despite the topic’s popularity in economics and political science research, this apparent paradox is a red herring. The most commonly used measure of ‘resource abundance’ can be more usefully...

This paper argues that the joint relation between long-term orientation, environmental quality and innovation plays a key role in explaining environment-poverty traps. Based on empirical observations, we allow for the subjective discount rate to negatively depend on environmental quality in an...