Environmental tax rhetoric in the Estonian policy discussion leads to a dilemma. Policy makers want to increase environmental charges for budgetary reasons and at the same time achieve environmental goals. The article examines the empirics of this issue, i.e. whether pollution charges have been...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of earmarking on central government environment protection expenditure. Since central government spending for the environment relies on earmarked revenues, which is not the case of the local government, it is expected that central government...

Climate change is a global-scale structural change, affecting economies across the world, alongside global fragmentation, digitalisation and demographics. This paper analyses the diffusion of climate policies and technologies and the role of institutions and governance in that process. It...

Public policy often regards pollution and other measures of poor environmental quality as public bads that result from market failure and require government intervention through regulatory policies and more stringent environmental standards. In this article, I argue that pollution and...

Environmental policy instruments have an impact on the incentives to invest in environmental R&D and this link should deserve careful consideration when introducing new instruments. Some authors argue that evironmental taxes and tradable permits have rather comparable impacts on environmental...

In this paper, we study a firm's optimal lobby behavior and its effect on investment in pollution abatement capital. We develop a dynamic framework where a representative firm can invest in both abatement and lobby capital in response to a possible future increase in pollution tax. We show that...

We explore the design of self-financing tax/subsidy mechanisms to solve hold-up problems in environmental regulation. Under Cournot competition, announcing the subsidy rate seems to be preferable to announcing the tax rate. Moreover, for constant marginal damage the hold-up problem can always be...

We study a firm's optimal lobby behavior and its effect on investment in pollution abatement capital. We develop a dynamic framework where a representative firm can invest in both abatement and lobby capital in response to a possible future increase in pollution tax. We show that when the firm...

This paper asks whether the policies and programmes enacted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK will compete with other goals of public policy, in particular social policy goals. The Climate Change Act 2008 has set the UK some of the most demanding targets in the world: to reduce GHG...