Natural disasters are on the rise worldwide. There are more and more intense natural disasters—which are defined to cause at least 100 deaths or to affect the basic survival needs of at least 1,000 people—resulting from floods and storms as well as droughts and heat waves. The Asia and the...

In this study we use historical emission data from installations under the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) to evaluate the impact of this policy on industrial greenhouse gas emissions during the first two trading phases (2005-2012). As such the analysis seeks to disentangle two...

This thesis consists of an introductory part and three papers. <p> Paper [I] examines how taxes affect consumption of commodities that are detrimental to health and the environment. Specifically, this paper examines if a tax increase leads to a significantly larger change in consumption than a...</p>

Addressing high and volatile natural resource prices, uncertain supply prospects, reindustrialization attempts and environmental damages related to resource use, resource efficiency has evolved into a highly debated proposal among academia, policy makers, firms and international financial...

Cross-country estimations of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) to empirically analyze the relationship between income and pollution have generally assumed a common structure for all countries. Since this latter feature is not supported by economic theory, this paper uses the Random...

This paper provides new evidence on the role of non-market based (“command-and-control”) regulations in relation to innovations in environmental technologies. While pricing is generally considered the first-best policy instrument, non-market regulations, such as technology standards and...

This paper reviews and summarizes most of the literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), focusing mainly on disentangling and clarifying the key concepts underlying the two classes of existing theoretical explanations for the EKC occurrence — those driven by technology and those...

Deindustrialisation, stagnant real incomes of production workers and increasing inequality are latter-day features of many economies. It’s common to assume that such developments pressure policy-makers to relax environmental standards. However, when heavily polluting industries become less...

We use a panel dataset of about 5,000 Lithuanian firms between 2003 and 2010, to assess the impact of the EU ETS on the environmental and economic performance of participating firms. Using a matching methodology, we are able to estimate the causal impact of EU ETS participation on CO2 emissions,...

Qualitative and theoretical literature indicates public policies as a major driver in the development of renewables. This paper empirically tests this claim, within a context of several drivers of renewables, by focusing on a large panel of European countries. Given the presence of...