In situations where the traditional instruments of trade policy are not available, protection for import-competing industries can be given only indirectly. One of the candidates of giving indirect subsidies is environmental regulation. The competitiveness of a domestic industry can be improved...

The paper is concerned with effects of lobbying activities by political pressure groups that wish to affect environmental legislation. Two interest groups are considered, environmentalists on the one hand and a polluters' lobby on the other. These two groups can influence the environmental...

Does international tax competition in the environmental field lead to undesirably low levels of environmental regulation and to unacceptable disruptions of environmental quality? The paper tries to answer this question in a non-competitive partial-equilibrium framework. There is one firm that...

Lobbying activities bias the political decision making process. There tend to be deviations from the socially optimal solutions. This paper shows that, in an international context, this bias is not necessarily harmful from an economic-welfare point of view. It may correct externalities that...

Ecological dumping is a catchword used in the public discussion on environmental policies in open economies to characterize situations in which a country uses a too-lax environmental legislation as an instrument of achieving trade-related economic policy goals. The paper first tries to define...

Fashions and their revivals occur in a rather erratic manner. The paper shows that such fluctuations can be derived from the utility maximizing behaviour of rational individuals with stable preferences. It is assumed that the demand for the fashion good is determined, amongst other variables, by...

This paper estimates the Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) of CO2 emissions in China based on a provincial panel for the period of 2001-2010. The provincial marginal abatement cost (MAC) of CO2 emissions is estimated using a parameterized directional output distance function. Four types of...

This paper looks at the importance of CSR considerations in the decision taken by a foreign affiliate of a multinational company about the choice of local suppliers. We investigate this empirically using unique firm level data for more than 2,000 foreign owned firms in 19 Sub-Saharan African...

We investigate whether recoveries following normal recessions differ from recoveries following recessions that are associated with either banking crises or housing crises. Using a parametric panel framework that allows for a bounce-back in the level of output during the recovery, we find that...