According to the Rockets and Feathers hypothesis (RFH), the transmission mechanism of positive and negative changes in the price of crude oil to the price of gasoline is asymmetric. Although there have been many contributions documenting that downstream prices are more reactive to increases than...

We propose the use of a three-level random intercept model to measure the degree of environmental policy performance of different countries and to study its determinants. Inspired by the literature on multilevel latent models and Item Response Theory (IRT), this framework treats policy...

We analyze the relationship between the prices of ethanol, agricultural commodities and livestock in Nebraska, the U.S. second largest ethanol producer. The paper focuses on long-run relations and Granger causality linkages between ethanol and the other commodities.The analysis takes possible...

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...

This paper examines the relationship between biofuels and commodity food prices in the U.S. from a new perspective. While a large body of literature has tried to explain the linkages between sample means and volatilities associated with ethanol and agricultural price returns, little is known...

Technical change is generally considered the key to the solution of environmental problems, in particular global phenomena like climate change. Scientists differ in their views on the thaumaturgic virtues of technical change. There are those who are confident that pollution-free technologies...

Choosing long-term goals is a key issue in the climate policy agenda. Targets should be easily measurable and feasible, but also effective in damage control. Once goals are set globally, given the uncertainty affecting long-term strategies and region-specific preferences for different policy...

This paper contributes to the induced innovation literature by extending the analysis of supply and demand determinants of innovation in energy-efficient technologies to account for international knowledge flows and spillovers. In the first part of the paper we select a sample of 38 innovating...

“Time to build” models of investment expenditures play an important role in many traditional and modern theories of the business cycle, especially for explaining the dynamic propagation of shocks. We estimate the structural parameters of a time-to-build model using firm-level investment data...

The number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced-form relationship between a country's economic growth and the quantity of various pollutants produced has recently increased significantly. In several cases researchers have found evidence in favor of an inverted-U...