Technological innovation is a key factor for achieving a better environmental performance of firms and the economy as a whole, to the extent that it helps to increase the material/energy efficiency of production processes and to reduce emission/effluents associated to outputs. Environmental...

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to...

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...

Wirtschaft und Umweltschutz sind eng miteinander verknüpft: Bei der Wirtschaftstätigkeit können Umweltschäden entstehen, die Wirtschaftstätigkeit kann aber auch durch strenge Umweltschutzregeln beeinträchtigt werden. Welche Grundsätze werden in der ökologischen Industriepolitik verfolgt?...

It has often been claimed that firms’ compliance to environmental regulations is higher than predicted by standard theory, a result labeled the “Harrington paradox” in the literature. Enforcement data from Norway presented here appears, at first glance, to confirm this “stylized fact”:...

It is frequently hypothesized that environmental management systems (EMSs) may improve a firm's environmental performance. Whether or not this hypothesis is true is as important from the perspective of environmental policy as questions relating to the relevant incentives for (1) a firm's...