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 productivity...

We develop a stochastic model to rank different policies (tax, fixed cap and relative cap) according to their expected total social costs. Three types of uncertainties are taken into account: uncertainty about abatement costs, business-as-usual (BAU) emissions and future economic output (the two...

The evolution of renewable resources is characterized in many cases by different time scales where some state variables such as biomass, may evolve relatively faster than other state variables such as carrying capacity. Ignoring this time scale separation means that a slowly changing variable is...

Competition in public utility sectors has been encouraged in recent years throughout Europe. In this paper we try and analyse the welfare effects of these reforms in Italy, with particular attention to water and energy goods. The first step is to introduce a sensible measure of affordability of...

This paper investigates the determinants of profit change over the period 1991-2008 for the Water and Sewerage Companies (WaSCs) in the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry. We firstly apply an input oriented profit decomposition approach following the approach of De Witte & Saal...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of regulation in the financial performance of the Water and Sewerage companies (WaSCs) in England and Wales. We apply a panel index approach across WaSCs over time to decompose unit-specific (temporal) index number based profitability growth as a...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology which can be used to set X-factor under price cap schemes, when the number of observations is limited. We firstly apply a panel index approach across Water and Sewerage companies (WaSCs) over time to decompose unit-specific index number based...

The purpose of this paper is the evaluation of various profit drivers such as price changes, productivity changes and quality levels on the financial performance of the Water and Sewerage Companies (WaSCs) over time in the case when the number of observations is limited. We thereby follow...

The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...