Ecolabel award schemes have become increasingly popular. Their rationale is to enable (concerned) consumers to identify "green" products. By so doing, ecolabelling should stimulate environmental innovation, and induce firms to reduce the supply of conventional (polluting) products. Our analysis...

Spontaneous adoption of cleaner technologies can be slowed down by various sources of inertia. Investment irreversibility, uncertainty about the actual private benefits, and the expectation of declining adoption costs due to the diffusion of environmental innovation, may involve a timing of...

Environmental policy affects the distribution of market shares if intermediate goods are differentiated in pollution intensity. When innovations are environmental friendly, a tax on emissions skews demand towards new goods, which are the most productive. In this case along a balanced growth path...

This paper is based on empirical research on a taxonomy of technological environmental innovations. It draws on a databank with over 500 examples of new technologies (materials, products, processes and practices) which come with benign environmental effects. The approaches applied to...

Increasing environmental awareness may affect the pleasure of consuming a good for which an environmental friendly substitute is available. When deciding to buy differentiated products, a compromise is sometimes made between preferred characteristics of the good and its environmental properties....

The paper examines the determinants that influence the environmental innovation behaviour of companies in Germany in a multivariate context by using data from the Mannheimer Innovations Panel 1993, which was part of the Community Innovation Survey. The objective is to analyse the general...

This paper investigates the companies' behavioural response to information-based environmental policies. We perform a panel analysis for 39 big companies in 16 countries, in 3 polluting industries (oil & gas, chemicals, power generation) over a 5- year period (1993-1997) to check whether...

Voluntary agreements with industry offer many examples of overcompliance with respect to environmental standards. Such phenomena seem to be irrational but appear less surprising considering firms' strategies are aimed to internalise environmental quality. We model the choice of the environmental...

The goal of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) is to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at levels which avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate (United Nations, 1992). This paper examines the performance and cost characteristics...

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to...