On the basis of abundant facility and firm-level data for German manufacturing, originating from a recent OECD-survey, this paper empirically investigates the relevance of a variety of incentives for environmentally innovative behavior of facilities, the respective influence of pressure groups,...

This paper deals with a special type of voluntary approach to protect the environment, for example, that we would like to term voluntary commitment. Its major characteristic is that it represents a unilateral declaration without a decisively active role of regulators. In other words, voluntary...

This paper compares technologies across space and time on the basis of factual and counterfactual substitution elasticities and argues that differences in estimated substitution elasticities should be decomposed into two counterfactual components. While the first component is designed to...

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...