Private actors have been actively working on standards that certify products and their production processes to minimize negative externalities. The number of Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) has been increasing over the last few decades, raising interest in understanding their impact on...

The paper analyzes the welfare properties of voluntary agreements (VA) with polluters, when they are obtained under the legislative threat of an alternative stricter policy option. In the model, the threat is an abatement quota. Both the threat and its probability of implementation are...

Analyses that examine the role of international standards on export performance has been concentrated on quality certifications. Very little is known about the impact of environmental certifications on exports. In this paper we employ firm-level data from Ecuador to assess the impact of the ISO...

This paper represents an empirical investigation of the "weak" and "strong" Porter Hypothesis (PH) focusing on the manufacturing sectors of European countries between 1997 and 2009. By and large, the literature has analyzed the impact of environmental regulation on innovation and on productivity...

In this review we synthetize the existing contributions that use econometric approaches to examine the influence of institutions and governance on environmental policy, environmental outcomes, and investments. The paper describes how the relationship between institutions and various response...

Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the...