The Austrian Federal Competition Authority (AFCA) invited comment on its draft guidelines for exempting “sustainability agreements” from condemnation under Austrian competition law. That law recently changed, allowing a specific exemption for otherwise anticompetitive horizontal agreements...

This contribution explores the interplay between liberalisation and decarbonisation of the European electricity market. The focus of this piece is to see whether liberalisation of the EU electricity market, in Europe realised by means of the unbundling regime, inherently promotes decarbonisation...

Hydraulic fracturing has been the subject of much debate recently, both in the United States and increasingly in Europe. Advances in hydraulic fracturing technology have led to a shale gas boom in the United States, significantly lowering natural gas prices, and causing some foreign businesses...

As tradeable permit programmes mature, two inter-related issues are becoming more critical in creating viable responses to a long-term, highly uncertain environmental problem such as climate change. First, we need to update policies in response to new information; and second, we need to design...

In the European Union (EU), twenty Member States offer public innovation support for private research and development (R&D) activities through either subsidies or a combination of tax cuts and subsidies. Existing studies show ambiguous results regarding the effectiveness of public innovation...

An expedient phase-out of carbon emissions in the electricity sector could be facilitated by imposing carbon fees and applying the revenue exclusively to subsidize new, low-carbon generation sources. Since there would initially be no "new sources," fees would be substantially zero at the outset...

In the European Union (EU), twenty Member States offer public innovation support for private research and development (R&D) activities through either subsidies or a combination of tax cuts and subsidies. Existing studies show ambiguous results regarding the effectiveness of public innovation...

We analyse R&D tax incentives in a detailed way considering a multi-period setting and economic assumptions which reflect a realistic economic environment. We measure the incentive's impact on the firm's total tax payments and the R&D cost by means of the simulation model European Tax Analyzer....

We investigate the effect of Europe's largest multilateral subsidy program for R&D-performing, small and medium-sized enterprises on firm growth. The program was organized under a specific budget allocation rule, referred to as Virtual Common Pot (VCP), which is designed to avoid...

New knowledge-intensive firms contribute to innovation, competition, and employment growth, but externalities like knowledge spillovers can prevent entrepreneurs from appropriating the full returns from their investments. In addition, uncertainty and information asymmetry pose challenges for...