This paper investigates the determinants of directed technical change at the Firm level in the electricity generation sector. We use firm-level data on patents filed in renewable (REN) and fossil fuel (FF) technologies by 5,261 european firms over the period 1978-2006. We investigate how energy...

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...

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...

We study whether to auction or to freely distribute emissions allowances when some firms participating in emissions trading are subject to price regulation. We show that free allowances allocated to price-regulated firms effectively act as a subsidy to output, distort consumer choices, and...

We study the role of alternative intertemporal preference representations in a model of economic growth, stock pollutant and endogenous risk of catastrophic collapse. We contrast the traditional “discounted utility” model, which assumes risk neutrality with respect to intertemporal utility,...

We study how substitutability between clean and dirty alternatives affects the effectiveness of environmental regulation in a field experiment that controls for the choice set of respondents. We consider four product categories with clean and dirty alternatives: (i) cola products in plastic...

Modern agriculture relies on a small number of highly productive crops and the continued expansion of agricultural land area has led to a significant loss of biodiversity. In this paper we consider the macroeconomic consequences of a continued expansion of modern agriculture from the perspective...

This paper uses avertive expenditures to estimate the demand for qualitative aspects of tap water supply. We focus on two characteristics that are of importance for water consumers: water hardness and aesthetic quality in terms of taste, smell and appearance. To elicit expenditures on substitute...

How much further will the global population expand, can all these extra mouths be fed, and what is the role in this story of economic growth? We study the interactions between global population, technological progress, per-capita income, demand for food and agricultural land expansion from 1960...

Discrete choice experiments (DCE) are increasingly used to quantify the demand for improvements to services provided by regulated utility companies and inform price controls. This form of preference elicitation, however, often reveals a high frequency of status quo (SQ) choices. This may signal...