This paper re-examines environmental regulation, under the assumption that pollution abatement technologies and services are provided by an imperfectly competitive environment industry. It is shown that each regulatory instrument (emission taxes and quotas; design standards; and voluntary...

Pollution abatement goods and services are now largely being delivered by a specialized "eco-industry." This note reconsiders Pigouvian taxes in this context. We find that the optimal emission tax will depart from the marginal social cost of pollution according to the polluters' and the...

This paper considers the environmental policy and welfare implications of a merger between environment firms (i.e., firms managing environmental resources or supplying pollution abatement goods and services). The traditional analysis of mergers in Cournot oligopolies is extended in two ways....

To comply with laws, regulations and social demands, polluting firms increasingly purchase the needed means from specialized suppliers. This paper analyzes this relatively recent phenomenon. We show how environmental regulation, the size of the output market, the elasticity of demand for...

New international standards for environmental auditing are now being actively promoted by public authorities and adopted by private firms. One important feature of these standards is their emphasis on managerial systems and incentives that support a wiser use of environmental resources. This...

Recent years have seen a surge in regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the development of non-tariff measures (NTMs). As a consequence, a growing number of RTAs include provisions on NTMs. This paper investigates the effect of standards-harmonization clauses contained in many North-South...

This paper investigates whether the Pesticides Initiative Program has signicantly affected the export performance of Senegal's horticulture industry. We apply two main microeconometric techniques, difference-in-differences and matching difference-in-differences, to identify the effect of the...

This paper estimates the effect of the decision to import intermediate goods and capital equipment on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) at the firm level on a panel of Spanish firms (1991-2002). We use two alternative approaches. In the first, we estimate TFP and apply a diff-in-diff estimator...

We construct an index of NTM transparency based on notifications to the WTO under the SPS and TBT agreements, the existence of a trade portal giving ready access to trade-relevant regulations, the existence of NTM data collected under the MAST classification, and the results of an experiment...

IntroductionAfter close to 70 years of trade liberalization, a series of recent events suggests that the tide may well be turning. International trade as a proportion of global gross domestic product (GDP) has stopped growing in the last decade, in what Constantinescu et al. (2015) dub the...