Conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource game are studied. This combines in a unique way local and global interactions. A fixed number of harvesters are located on a spatial grid. Harvesters choose among three strategies: defection, cooperation, and...

We study the conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource game. We consider three types of agents: cooperators, defectors and enforcers. The role of enforcers is to punish defectors for overharvesting the resource. Agents are located around a circle and they only...

Economic theories of managing renewable resources, such as fisheries and forestry, traditionally assume that individual harvesters are perfectly rational and thus able to compute the harvesting strategy that maximizes their discounted profits. The current paper presents an alternative approach...

Most insights of environmental economics are in line with the standard neo-classical economic model of rational behaviour, formulated in terms of maximisation of utility in general, or profits in particular. The standard theory of environmental policy is a case in point. However, the...

Energy conservation is widely accepted as an important strategy to combat climate change. It can, nevertheless, stimulate new energy uses that partly offset the original savings. This is known as rebound. One particular rebound mechanism is re-spending of money savings associated with energy...

There is currently much hope about environmental innovation and green technologies, notably as a response to the threat of climate change. This paper offers a critical perspective on the role of technological innovation to solving environmental problems, based on considering empirical economic...

This paper investigates the impact of alternative environmental policy instruments on technological innovations aiming to improve energy-efficiency in buildings. The empirical analysis focuses on three main types of policy instruments, namely regulatory energy standards in buildings codes,...

Addressing both the challenge of climate change and the world's growing energy needs will only be possible by achieving a breakthrough in clean technologies in order to deliver safe, clean and sustainable energy for future generations. Such a large-scale technological transition will require...

This paper investigates the determinants of directed technical change in the electricity generation sector. We use firm-level data on patents led in renewable (REN) and fossil fuel (FF) technologies by about 7,000 European firms over the period 1978-2006. We separately study specialized firms...