This paper analyses the adoption of energy-efficiency enhancing technologies by heterogeneous firms. The fact that energy use does not only cause external environmental costs through pollution, but also directly affects the profitability of the firm and hence its behaviour on input and output...

This paper analyses policy measures within a two sector endogenously growing economy with pollution. Pollution is either generated by production or by the use of physical capital in production, and can be reduced by public abatement activities. In this generalized Uzawa Lucas model, the effects...

Environment and economy-no conflict -- Market mistakes and how unpaid-for external effects are killing us -- Climate change: "the greatest external effect in human history" -- How to deal with external effects -- Solving the climate problem -- Everyone's property is no one's property -- Natural...

Social norms and intrinsic motivations lead to voluntary environmentally responsible behaviour even in the absence of environmental policy. The paper shows that the introduction of environmental policy may lead to a reduction of voluntary abatement and sometimes may increase emissions and...

The ecological literature suggests that biodiversity reduces the variance of ecosystem services. Thus, conservative biodiversity management has an insurance value to risk-averse users of ecosystem services. We analyze a conceptual ecological-economic model in which such management measures...

Profit-seeking firms can be induced to internalise the environmental damages caused by production via several policy instruments, a widely used one being emission permits. In a very influential paper, Laffont and Tirole (J Public Econ 62:127-140, 1996) point out that the allocation of pollution...