Using Japanese facility-level data from an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development survey, we estimate the effects of implementation of ISO14001 and publication of environmental reports on the facilities' environmental performance. While most previous studies focused on an index...

National government-funded payments for environmental services (PES) programs often lack sustainable financing and fail to target payments to providers of important environmental services. In principle, these problems can be mitigated by supplementing government financing with contributions from...

In the recent last years, in particular in the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis, many countries initiated economic recovery plans with a major focus on stimulating green entrepreneurial activities to revive economic growth. Further, the recovery plans intend to improve a...

It is well known that uncertainty concerning firms’ costs as well as market power of the latter have to be taken into account in order to design and choose environmental policy instruments in an optimal way. As a matter of fact, in most actual regulation settings the policy maker has to face...

Strategic environmental policy games are usually based on simultaneous decision making and reach the conclusion that the policy choices are strategic substitutes. Empirical evidence, however, shows that the introduction of a regulatory instrument usually follows a consecutive pattern that is...

We incorporate the process of policy diffusion (i.e. the uncoordinated dissemination of policies among countries) into a probabilistic two-country-model of strategic environmental policy. Contrary to the usual setting with simultaneous decision making we consider the impact of sequential...

In the recent last years, in particular in the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis, many countries initiated economic recovery plans with a major focus on stimulating green entrepreneurial activities to revive economic growth. Further, the recovery plans intend to improve a...

Recent political discussions about the possible advantages of first-mover behaviour in terms of environmental policy again called attention to the well-established controversy about the effects of environmental regulation on international competitiveness. Conventional theory claims that the...

Policy diffusion refers to the process by which a political innovation like the introduction of a novel emission tax disseminates over time among countries. In order to analyze this issue from an economic point of view we develop a simple two-country-model of the taxation of emissions in...

Over the coming decades, the cost of U.S. climate change policy likely will be comparable to the total cost of all existing environmental regulation-perhaps 1-2 percent of national income. In order to avoid higher costs, policy efforts should create incentives for firms and individuals to pursue...