Water pollution in the Venice Lagoon and its catchment is a main environmental issue. In Italy public funds are made available by specific national and regional regulations in order to support the realisation of initiatives for the abatement of pollutant loads that travel from the catchment into...

The Kyoto Protocol sets legally binding emission targets for industrialised countries without accounting for reductions carried out prior to 2008, the beginning of the first commitment period. There exists only one exception, the project-based Clean Development Mechanism where credits accrue...

This paper investigates the existing Italian regulation regarding the so-called "administration by agreements" and the possibility to adapt the existing legal system to voluntary agreements in the environmental field in the light of the European guidelines on this issue. The research consists of...

The Environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure foresees that the information on the environmental effects of a specific activity is used to support the decision on whether to give a project consent, and has the ability to ensure no more than that the decision taken is an informed one. As...

I model environmental overcompliance as a signalling device. In the model, a benevolent government may or may not tighten environmental standards. Production costs under the stricter environmental regulation are private information to the firms, and tightening environmental policy is socially...

The aim of this paper is to provide a review of policy instruments aimed at controlling pollution from agricultural diffuse sources, and compare their pros and cons. The review also includes a description of instruments introduced through recent reforms of the European Common Agricultural Policy...

The aim of this paper is to present an alternative methodology for discounting far distant future externalities genereted by an investment project: time-declining discount rates. First I present the experimental evidence on individuals' time-inconsistency. Second I consider the theoretical...

In the paper we propose an to evaluation of the environmental effects of consumption activities. The approach consists of two steps, namely (1) assignment of environmental effects to consumption activities, for which we propose to use the methods of (multidimensional) cost sharing, and (2) a...

This paper investigates the effect of credibility of environmental policies on environmental innovation and welfare. When the government precommits to an emission tax, the monopolist's abatement effort is lower than if the environmental policy is at the government's discretion. Time consistent...

The paper explores abatement investment and location responses to environmental policy, which takes the form of emission taxes or tradable emission permits and subsidies against the costs of abatement investment, under uncertainty and irreversibility. Uncertainty is associated with output price,...