Voluntary environmental management programs for firms have become an increasingly popular instrument of environmental policy. However, the literature's conclusion on the effectiveness of such programs is ambiguous, and for the European region there is a lack of evidence based on a large control...

We conduct a field experiment with the visitors of the German Catholic Convention in Münster, Germany. We aim at investigating the effect of the announced attitude of a Catholic institution concerning climate protection efforts, of people's experimentally induced religiosity (using a priming...

The aim of this study is to link variation in energy cost misperceptions to variation in households' energy consumption. The focus is on two sorts of misperceptions: First, present biased discounting of future energy costs and second, biased energy price beliefs. By running an artefactual field...

We investigate the effect of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on the economic performance of manufacturing firms in Germany. Our difference-in-differences framework relies on several parametric conditioning strategies and nearest neighbor matching. As a measure of economic...

Social norms can help to foster cooperation and to overcome the free-rider problem in private provision of public goods. This paper focuses on the enforcement of social norms by a self-introduced punishment and reward scheme. We analyse if subjects achieve to implement a norm-enforcement...

This study explores whether negative income shocks from the COVID-19 pandemic affect the demand for environmental policy. By running a survey in Germany in May 2020, we show that there is a large and negative correlation between the COVID-19 income shocks and the willingness to support green...

The ongoing transformation of the world’s energy systems requires an international monitoring to evaluate the transformation processes and to identify transferable leading practice policies. For this purpose, an independent scientific expert commission should be established for the G20. By...