Why do for-profit firms take voluntary steps to improve the environment? Brand appeal to green consumers or investors, the ability to influence or avoid regulation, or the experience gained for future regulation, have all been suggested as possible reasons. The empirical evidence is decidedly...

China's emerging standing in the world demands a major rethinking of its diplomatic strategies. Given its population size, geographical scale, economic power and military presence, China is poised to play a larger political role in the twenty-first century, and is thus perceived by the...

Leveraging the sharp changes in environmental regulation embedded in China's 11th Five-Year Plan (FYP), which covered the period from 2006 to 2010, we characterize the degree to which the plan softens trade-offs between emissions and output. We document that the 11th FYP is associated with...

This paper uses a global integrated assessment model to assess how developing Asia, the world's fastest-growing source of carbon emissions, could transition to low-carbon growth. It finds that national net-zero pledges do not have a high chance of keeping peak warming below 2êC. Under an...

Waterborne diseases lead to over 6 billion diarrheal episodes per year, with most of the burden on children in low-income countries. We employ hydrological engineering principles to construct a novel measure of stagnant water, crucial to the spread of these diseases. Using a...

In the conditions of modern business environment of energy companies, studies of their impact on environmental protection are becoming increasingly important. The growing concern at the macro level of the resulting climate change due to energy production is justified. The ecological component in...

Using data on institutional investors' bond holdings, we investigate the resilience of green bonds to the COVID-19 shock in a difference-in-differences framework. We find that during the COVID outbreak green bonds experience lower sales, on average, while in normal times no significant...

This paper shows that, when the price of emission allowances is sufficiently high, emission trading schemes improve the emission efficiency of highly polluting firms. The efficiency gain comes from a relative decrease in emissions rather than a relative increase in operating revenue. Part of the...

This paper adds to the scarce empirical evidence related to the impact of climate change on the manufacturing sector. To study the effect of temperature on energy use and CO2 emissions daily temperature information from 11.000 German municipalities are combined with the census of the...

This paper re-examines the relationship between per capita income, inequality, and per capita emissions while accounting for nonhomotheticity in green preferences and nonlinearities in the impact of economic growth on GHG emissions. Theoretically, our research is motivated by the fact that if...