Environmental policy, technology adoption and the size distribution of firms

Sammanfattning

The potential impacts of strict environmental policies on production costs and firms' competitiviness are central to the choice of which policy to implement. However, not all the industries nor all firms within an industry are affected in the same way. In this paper, we investigate the effects of emission taxes, uniform emission standards, and performance standards on the size distribution of firms. Our results indicate that, unlike emission taxes and performance standards, emission standards introduce regulatory asymmetries favoring small firms. On the contrary, emission taxes and performance standards reduce to a lower extent profits of larger firms but they do modify the optimal scale of firms. We also show that when the regulatory asymmetries created by emissions standards are taken into account, the profitability of emissions reducing technologies is higher under emission standards than under market-based instruments. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Nyckelord

Environmental regulations; Energy efficiency; Size distribution; Emission taxes; Emission standards; Performance standards

Publicerad i

Energy Economics
2018, volym: 72, sidor: 470-485

SLU författare

• Kyriakopoulou, Efthymia

  • Institutionen för ekonomi, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    
  • University of Luxembourg

Globala målen (SDG)

SDG7 Hållbar energi för alla
SDG8 Anständiga arbetsvillkor och ekonomisk tillväxt
SDG9 Hållbar industri, innovationer och infrastruktur
SDG12 Hållbar konsumtion och produktion

UKÄ forskningsämne

Nationalekonomi

Publikationens identifierare

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2018.04.025

Permanent länk till denna sida (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/96160