In a setting where retailers and suppliers compete for each other by offering binding contracts, exclusivity clauses serve as a competitive device. As a result of these clauses, firms addressed by contracts only accept the most favorable deal. Thus the contract-issuing parties have to squeeze...

This paper demonstrates that voluntary agreements between a regulator and an industry can be Pareto superior to environmental taxes. Further, such agreements may differ from direct regulation in a non-trivial way. The first-best optimum may be included in the set of possible agreements, even if...

It is sometimes claimed that individuals' contributions to public goods are not motivated by economic costs and benefits alone, but that people also have a moral or norm-based motivation. A number of studies indicate that such moral or norm-based motivation might be crowded out, or crowded in,...

This article studies the process from data acquisition to policy decision in relation to an optimum policy on global warming. Policymakers must be reasonably skeptical before proposing remedies to curb warming, but policymakers cannot await the final proof of any proposal's merit. Balancing...

We investigate whether the future relationships between several pollutants and per capita income in rich countries may assume the inverted U-forms of Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC). The emission-augmenting effect of scaling up aggregate economic activity may be counteracted by greener...

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 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...

According to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) literature, several mechanisms within rich economies, including increased willingness to conduct abatement policies, contribute to reduce environmental problems. Unilateral environmental policies in open economies may affect other countries...

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...

Pollution intensive production can be avoided domestically by increased imports and less exports of dirty products. Such trade effects may imply more emissions abroad, or pollution leakages. We study whether such leakages may contribute to the observed inverted relationship between emissions and...