The Central and Eastern European countries significantly reduced their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions between 1995 and 2003. Was this emission reduction just the fortuitous result of the major economic transformation undergone by countries in the transition? Or is it rather a result of more...

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....

This paper analyses optimal investments in innovation when dealing with a stringent climate target and with the uncertain effectiveness of R&D. The innovation needed to achieve the deep cut in emissions is modelled by a backstop carbon-free technology whose cost depends on R&D investments. To...

This paper addresses the impact of endogenous technology through research and development (R&D) and learning by doing (LbD) on the timing of environmental policy. We develop two models, the first with R&D and the second with LbD. We study the interaction between environmental taxes and...

We propose the use of a three-level random intercept model to measure the degree of environmental policy performance of different countries and to study its determinants. Inspired by the literature on multilevel latent models and Item Response Theory (IRT), this framework treats policy...

Many environmental-policy problems are characterized by complexity and uncertainty. Government’s choice concerning these policies commonly relies on information provided by a bureaucracy. Environmental bureaucrats often have a political motivation of their own, so they might be tempted to...

This paper investigates the role of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and Environmental Policies (EPs) on clean (renewable) and dirty (fossil-based) technology diffusion from top-innovators. IPR protection and EPs are extensively debated policy tools, as IPR protection addresses...

We explain the spatial concentration of economic activity, in a model of economic geography, when the cost of environmental policy - which is increasing in the concentration of emissions - and an immobile production factor act as centrifugal forces, while positive knowledge spillovers and...

Total factor productivity growth (TFPG) has been traditionally associated with technological change. We show that when a factor of production, such as energy, generates an environmental externality in the form of CO2 emissions which is not internalized because of lack of environmental policy,...

The design of environmental policy typically takes place within a framework in which uncertainty over the future impact of pollution and two different kinds of irreversibilities interact. The first kind of irreversibility concerns the sunk cost of environmental degradation; the second is related...