Nowadays, an important debate in the international economies is the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change related. Discussions begin to gain the world with the signature of the Kyoto Protocol (1997), where an international agreement was reached to reduce global emissions....

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) has been extensively criticized on econometric and theoretical grounds. Recent econometric results and case studies show that national emissions of important pollutants are monotonic in income but changes in technology can lead over time to reductions in...

Social scientists have long argued that developed countries are more and more responsible for climate change because they externalise pollution to less developed countries. This paper offers a way to quantify climate responsibility by calculating carbon footprints and carbon balances between...

In "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin argues that those who can use a resource for free consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. Public resources eventually collapse because people overuse them. Hardin’s widely accepted argument seems correct as far as it goes,...

This paper examines weight loss and the formation of healthy habits through cash rewards in the context of a multi-phase randomized controlled trial involving 700 obese individuals. We find effects of monetary incentives for weight loss of up to EUR 300 on body weight during all experimental...

We conduct a field experiment among 189 stores of a retail chain to study dynamic incentive effects of relative performance pay. Employees in the randomly selected treatment stores could win a bonus by outperforming three comparable stores from the control group over the course of four weeks....

Climate change and outdoor air pollution are two of the most challenging environmental issues that modern society faces. These challenges are strongly linked through their emission sources, the sectors they affect and the policies that can be implemented to reduce emissions. They also interact...

Based on an in-depth literature review and responses to a survey among OECD member countries, this paper discusses the use of flexibility mechanisms in environmental regulations. Such mechanisms can provide flexibility as to how a given environmental improvement is achieved, regarding where...

In addition to being characterised by the rapid population growth, the cities have long represented the centres of knowledge and the sources of growth and innovation, with unique cultural and architectural features, offering exceptional capacity for economic development. The cities are linked to...

The conventional neoclassical economic wisdom argues that the opportunity costs of environmental regulations are high, with negative implications for costs and profits and, by implication, for growth and per capita gross domestic product (GDP). The minority view that environmental controls...