Although environmental regulations may imply a cost increase on firm's conventional input factors, such regulations could stimulate the incentives to improve factor productivity. Productivity measures including indicators capturing environmental improvements may also show higher or lower...

Many economists maintain that environmental regulations hamper productivity growth. However, recently, an opposing view has gained advocates. Indeed, it has been suggested that the empirically detected inverse relationship between environmental regulations and productivity growth is an almost...

The Integration Pollution and Prevention Control (IPPC) directive from the European Union implies that the regulatory emission caps should be set in accordance with each industry's Best Available Techniques (BAT). The directive is under implementation in Norway, and it represents a refocus of...

Although most production activities involve multiple outputs, econometric models of production or cost functions normally involve only one single homogeneous output. The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that a multiproduct specification is superior to a model with a single homogenous...

Productivity measures ignoring environmental effects may give misleading information on total productivity growth. Further, business cycles in the form of capacity utilization may also significantly influence productivity measures. In this paper, we develop an overall Malmquist productivity...

Several economists have maintained that social and internalized norms can enforce cooperation in public good situations. This experimental study investigates impacts of social and internalized norms for cooperation among strangers in a public good game. The experiment has two treatment effects....

Several economists have maintained that social sanctions can enforce cooperation in public good situations. This experimental study investigates whether indirect social sanctions from monetarily unaffected observers can increase contributions to a public good. The experiment has two treatment...

The present paper investigates effects of regulatory inspections on compliance and emissions of energy intensive manufacturing plants in Norway. The regression analysis shows that increased probability of inspection reduces the probability of violation. This is in line with previous studies, and...

It has been claimed that good environmental performance can improve firms' economic performance. However, because of e.g. data limitations, the methods applied in most previous quantitative empirical studies of the relationship between environmental and economic performance of firms suffer from...

Time-series regressions including non-linear transformations of an integrated variable are not uncommon in various fields of economics. In particular, within the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) literature, where the effect on the environment of income levels is investigated, it is standard...