In this paper we study environmental efficiency within a pollution generating technology. Pollutants, or bads, are explicitly modeled by imposing technology properties of disposability and null-jointness. With data on firms from Swedish manufacturing, we investigate the potential to reduce...

Emissions trading systems for non-renewable and Feed-In Tariffs for renewable energy sources are currently widely in use. This study investigates how renewable targets for the Nordic power market might be achieved at the lowest possible costs. The instruments investigated are Feed-In Tariffs...

Multifactor productivity is a comprehensive measure of productivity where the underlying production function accounts for multiple factor inputs, traditionally labour and produced capital. While single-factor productivity is intuitively simple, such measure offers a biased picture of the economy...

Despite the progress that has been made in the measurement of productivity, there have been few attempts to cast emissions of bad outputs within a joint-production framework. This paper does so. It proposes an experimental framework that depends critically on the shadow price estimates of...

This thesis consists of five papers, four of them basically concerning environmental issues, while the fifth paper addresses the issue of measuring output from the educational sector. <p> The first paper starts from the fact that industrial activity causes environmental damage. Therefore, public...</p>

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a procedure to empirically test the Porter hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that environmental regulation not only increases environmental quality, but also brings the polluting producers information that makes them more resource efficient, as well as...

The purpose of this paper is to compute and evaluate producers’ marginal abatement costs (MACs). These costs are obtained by calculating shadow prices of bad outputs from the production technology, which is represented by the estimated directional output distance function. To be more specific,...

This paper explores the link between accountability, corruption and efficiency in the context of a career concern model where politically con- nected local monopolies are in charge of the provision of a local public service. We fi?nd that both corruption and a low degree of accountabil- ity...

The federal government now confronts considerable political pressure to add CO2 to the existing set of criteria air pollutants. As with current criteria pollutants, proposals call for control of CO2, assuming that the control of each of the three criteria pollutants is separable from the others....

This paper selects 32 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) from 2005 to 2007, using the input variables of industry and population and the output variances of gross domestic product (GDP) and the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. In recent years the...