Empirical evidence evaluating the efficiency of economic instruments is still rare, despite significant theoretical advances over the last decades. The objective of this paper is to evaluate one form of environmental taxation, the French tax on air pollution from 1990-99. While starting out in...

In many cases consumers cannot observe firms’ investment in quality or safety, but have only beliefs on the average quality of the industry. In addition, the outcome of the collective investment game of the firms may be stochastic since firms cannot control perfectly the technology or external...

We estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for better quality of tap water on a unique cross-section sample from 10 OECD countries. On the pooled sample, households are willing to pay 7.5% of the median annual water bill to improve the tap water quality. The highest relative WTP for better tap water...

The Central and Eastern European countries significantly reduced their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions between 1995 and 2003. Was this emission reduction just the fortuitous result of the major economic transformation undergone by countries in the transition? Or is it rather a result of more...