The purpose of the paper is to narrow the gap between the widespread use of voluntary agreements and research on the rationale of such approaches. A typical example are voluntary agreements of many industries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions because of global warming. If the industry...

Environmental protection is one of Europe's key values. The EU has set clear policy objectives to achieve its environmental goals. The EU has favoured market-based instruments, among which fiscal instruments to tackle the climate change problem. This paper takes a policy-making perspective and...

We analyze a model where firms chose a production technology which, together with some random event, determines the final emission level. We consider the coexistence of two alternative technologies: a "clean" technology, and a "dirty" technology. The environmental regulation is based on taxes...

We consider a model of polluting firms subject to tax on emissions, monitoring, and penalties in case of underreporting and which face a choice between a more expensive clean and a less expensive dirty technology. Moreover, emissions are subject to random events.We show that the optimal...

The paper examines the determinants that influence the environmental innovation behaviour of companies in Germany in a multivariate context by using data from the Mannheimer Innovations Panel 1993, which was part of the Community Innovation Survey. The objective is to analyse the general...

The author analyzes the optimal investment in environmental protection in a model of an infinite series of non-overlapping hyperbolically discounting agents. He shows that without a commitment mechanism society is eventually stuck in a situation where all agents prefer further investment in the...

In this paper, we extend the well known result that hyperbolically discounting agents tend to postpone costs into the future. In a simple model we show that, without commitment to the ex ante optimal plan, no investment in environmental protection is undertaken over the whole time horizon, no...

This paper examines the relationship between corporate activities to address climate change and stock performance. By separately analyzing the US and European stock markets for different sub-periods, we highlight the impact of the underlying climate policy regime. Methodologically, we compare...