Environmental economics passed its age of infancy. It grew rapidly over the last decades and established itself as a discipline based on the powerful economic paradigm and reaching beyond it to capture important economy-environment interactions. The view offered here on the future of...

This paper deals with two different types of irreversibility: Pollution irreversibility occurs if the stock of pollution cannot be reduced (any more) by nature's assimilative capacity; characteristics irreversibility occurs when some characteristic of the environmental resource is irreversibly...

We study the environmental and economic effects of public abatement in the presence of multiple stable steady-state ecological equilibria. Under shallow-lake dynamics (SLD), the isocline for the stock of pollution features two stable branches, a good and a bad one. Assuming that the ecology is...

Economic models of climate policy (or policies to combat other environmental problems) typically neglect psychological adaptation to changing life circumstances. People may adapt or become more sensitive, to different degrees, to a deteriorated environment. The present paper addresses these...

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...

To determine the amount of environmental goods and services to provide or preserve, it is necessary to weigh society's degree of preference for the environment vis-à-vis other goods and services. This value measure serves to inform the decision-making and policy-making process and thereby...

This research investigates eco-clusters as driver for greening regional economic policy and examines necessary incentive structures to foster eco-innovation as well as growth and employment in the eco-industry sector. Eco-clusters are seen in context with sustainability and environmental...

Wirtschaftswissenschaften wird zunächst in Grundzügen beschrieben und dann hinsichtlich seiner langfristigen Tragfähigkeit kritisch reflektiert: Wir unterscheiden hierbei zwei gegensätzliche Standpunkte: Einen optimistischen und einen pessimistischen. Welchen man einnimmt, hängt wesentlich...