The EU has a consolidated climate and energy regulation: it played a pioneering role by adopting a wide range of climate change policies and establishing the first regional Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). These policies, however, raise several concerns regarding both their environmental...

This paper evaluates green stimulus packages that were introduced in response to the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-08 and draws lessons relevant for greening the recovery from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. The paper underscores the importance of building in policy evaluation...

As governments spend unprecedented sums of public money on pandemic related rescue and recovery measures, while humankind is facing mounting long-term challenges - and above all the climate crisis -, the question whether and to what extent COVID-19 recovery programmes contribute to countries'...

In a model where firms face a continuous choice of how much to invest in environmental innovation, we show that an ever stricter environmental policy does not always lead to ever cleaner production methods and ever lower production of polluting goods. It does so when the abatement technology is...

For any emission trading system (ETS) with quantity-based endogenous supply of allowances, there exists a negative demand shock, e.g. induced by abatement policy, that increases aggregate supply and thus cumulative emissions. We prove this green paradox for a general model and then apply it to...

This paper uses a unique large-size data set from China's most developed areas to examine the innovation impacts of environmental regulations. Reduction mandates on designated pollutants between the 10th and the 12th Five-Year Plans (2001–2015) are explored to construct spatial and temporal...

We investigate how irreversibility in "dirty" and "clean" capital stocks affects optimal climate policy, from both theoretical and numerical perspectives. An increasing carbon tax will reduce investments in assets that pollute, and so reduce emissions in the short term: our "irreversibility...