Production often causes pollution as a by-product. Once environmental degradation becomes too severe, regulation is introduced by which society forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production processes. We model this transition as a change in general purpose technology and...

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) has been the dominant approach among economists to modeling aggregate pollution emissions and ambient pollution concentrations over the last quarter century. Despite this, the EKC was criticized almost from the start and decomposition approaches have been...

This review develops an integrated baseline model to assess the trade-offs between the natural environment and economic growth. Consumption growth is considered in terms of both welfare and sustainability. The framework features capital accumulation and the sectoral structure of the economy as...

This is the first paper to use U.S. state-level data to econometrically assess education’s role in an environmental Kuznets curve setting. The empirical analysis involves testing several models to evaluate the impact of education on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and energy consumption and...

This paper investigates the short-run effects of economic growth on carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and the manufacture of cement for 189 countries over the period 1961-2010. Contrary to what has previously been reported, we conclude that there is no strong evidence...