This paper examines the impact of participation in the Climate Wise program, one of the largest voluntary programs enacted in the US, on innovative activity by firms. In operation from 1993 to 2000, the Climate Wise program was designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by promoting innovation...

The expansion of wind-generation in the United States poses significant challenges to policy-makers, particularly because wind's intermittency and unpredictability can exacerbate problems of congestion on a transmission-constrained grid. Understanding these issues is necessary if optimal...

We modify the vertically differentiated duopoly model by André et al. (2009) replacing Bertrand with Cournot behaviour, and we characterise the region wherein a Porter-type result takes place. We show that the Porter hypothesis applies in an equilibrium taking always the form of a prisoner's...

We investigate conditions that amplify market failures in energy innovations, and suggest optimal policy instruments to address them. Using an intertemporal general equilibrium model we show that ‘small’ market imperfections may trigger a several decades lasting dominance of an incumbent...

Pollution prevention (P2) remains the key pollution reduction strategy in the US despite its limited success in improving environmental performance. To aid the targeting of policies to promote the types of P2 that achieve environmental goals, this study investigates the intricate nature of P2...

Within a non-cooperative transboundary pollution game, we investigate the impact of the adoption of a cleaner technology (i.e., a decrease in the emission to output ratio). We show that countries may respond by increasing their emissions resulting in an increase in the stock of pollution that...

R&D is an uncertain activity with highly skewed outcomes. Nonetheless, most recent empirical studies and modeling estimates of the potential of technological change focus on the average returns to research and development (R&D) for a composite technology and contain little or no information...

By using a unique cross-sectional dataset of Chinese industrial firms, this paper investigates the external and internal effects of human capital on firms’ environmental performance. The result shows that firms have better environmental compliance because they are ‘pushed’ into compliance...

We model a market with environmentally conscious consumers and a duopoly in which firms consider the adoption of a clean technology. We show that as pollution increases, consumers shift more resources to the environmental activities, thereby affecting negatively the demand faced by the duopoly....

Technological progress is generally considered a key element in the move towards a less carbon-intensive energy use, and therefore public energy research expenditure has increased in many countries. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether relatively high subsidies to private energy...