Since 1997 the Netherlands has a tax allowance scheme introduced to promote investments in energy saving technologies and sustainable energy production. This Energy Investment Tax Allowance (EIA in Dutch) reduces up-front investment costs for firms investing in the newest energy saving and...

Critics of privatization argue that poor labor force restructuring is a key concern and that governments should establish better retrenchment programs. Using new data from arandom sample of 400 companies in the world, we test competing theories about the wisdom of retrenchment programs and their...

This article studies the effects of tax competition on the provision of public goods under business risk and partial irreversibility of investment. As will be shown, the provision of public goods changes over time and also depends on the business cycle. In particular, under source-based...

This paper evaluates the effects of the lack of regulatory commitment on emission tax applied by the regulator, abatement effort made by the monopoly and social welfare comparing two alternative policy games. The first game assumes that the regulator commits to an ex-ante level of the emission...

This paper examines the double dividend hypothesis under wage uncertainty. In the presence of two market failures we show that second-best requires a lower than the Pigouvian tax, and a higher than "first-best" labour income tax. Starting from a state in which the environmental tax is below...

We compare the instantaneous and the long run effects of environmental reform in closed and open economies. Harmonization upward (decreasing distortions where they are most severe) or harmonization downward (increasing distortions where they are less severe), both tend to increase instantaneous...

International environmental agreements are increasingly important in a globalised economy. Beyond their specific interest, these agreements are also important in the context of coalition formation theory. Given the incentives to free ride, associated to the environment as a public good and to...

This paper re-examines the optimal tax design problem (income and commodities) in the presence of externalities. The nature of the second-best, and the choice of the tax instruments, are motivated by the informational structure in the economy. The main results are: (i) environmental levies...

In this paper we compare the effectiveness and welfare effects of alternative fuel efficiency, environmental and transport policies for a given urban area. The urban transport activities are represented as a set of interrelated markets, one for each mode of transport and type of vehicle. For...

In this paper we focus on how an international carbon treaty will influence the exploration of oil in Non-OPEC countries. We present a numerical intertemporal global equilibrium model for the fossil fuel markets. The international oil market is modelled with a cartel (OPEC) and a competitive...