Improverail aims are to further support the establishment of railway infrastructure management in accordance with Directive 91/440, as well as the new railway infrastructure directives, by developing the necessary tools for modelling the management of railway infrastructure; by evaluating...

Time is money! Applying this common saying to their own sphere of activity, economists, following the example of Gary Becker, have for the past twenty or thirty years incorporated the issue of time into their analytical reasoning. A scarce resource, time is a topic of study that lends itself...

This paper focuses on the economic valuation of the impact of local air pollution. Two main issues are considered: 1. The scientific issue: what is estimated, how and why? The main studies from the nineties are presented here. Two strong issues are stressed, with the diversity of valuation...

There might be various aims for the vertical separation in railways such as the one instituted by the European Commission. One aim might be to improve efficiency, another one might be to introduce competition, as a mean, precisely to improve efficiency. Vertical separation creates, by itself,...

This paper examines the relative influence of domestic and foreign renewable energy policies on innovation activity in wind power using patent data from OECD countries from 1994 to 2005. We distinguish between the impact of demand-pull policies (e.g., guaranteed tariffs, investment and...

The paper analyzes the efficiency of extended producer responsibility (EPR) for waste management. We consider a vertically differentiated duopoly where endogenous market quality affects waste disposal costs. Each producer has to meet a take-back requirement that forces it to collect and treat...

Does self-regulation improve social welfare? We develop a policy game featuring a regulator and a firm that can unilaterally commit to better environmental or social behavior in order to preempt future public policy. We show that the answer depends on the set of policy instruments available to...

The starting point of this paper is to consider that there is no general answer to the question of the equity of urban road pricing. We therefore simulate and compare the distributional effects on commuters of nine toll scenarios for Paris, assuming that utility is nonlinear in income. We show...

China is the largest solar photovoltaic cell producer in the world, with more than one third of worldwide production in 2008, exporting more than 95 percent of what it produces. The purpose of this paper is to understand the drivers of this success and its limits, with a particular emphasis on...

In reality, most voluntary agreements with polluters (VAs) are not enforceable in the sense that no legal tools are available to enforce Örmsí commitments. We examine whether such VAs are able to achieve an e¢ cient level of environmental protection when they are obtained under the...