Based on a unique firm-level data set from the German manufacturing sector, this paper disentangles environmental and non-environmental product and process innovations. The multivariate probit analysis shows that the various innovation types are determined by different factors. The estimation...

There is widespread concern that climate policy is moving too slowly and that decarbonization of economic development is coming too late for effective climate protection. We analyze three different effects that emerge endogenously during decarbonization and amplify current policies: growing...

Voluntary approaches to environmental policy can contribute to stemming environmental degradation in developing countries with weak institutions. We evaluate the role of a behavioral anomaly, limited attention paid by owners or managers, in explaining the voluntary adoption of environmental...

The health and safety of workers are important determinants of their productivity. In manufacturing industries, occupational health and safety (OHS) measures are critical workplace practices for employers to ensure better working conditions for employees, particularly in industries with rampant...

So-called "uphill capital flows", i.e. flows of physical capital from relatively poor to rich countries, are a new phenomenon with yet unclear impact. We develop a unified framework incorporating economic institutions, human capital and physical capital to study the interaction of international...

A coarse certification provides simple, but incomplete information about quality. Its main rationale is to help consumers trade off dimensions of quality that are complex and lack salience. In imperfectly competitive markets, it may induce excess bunching at the certification requirement, crowd...

This paper shows that firms respond strategically to ENERGY STAR, a voluntary certification program for energy-efficient products. Firms offer products that bunch at the certification requirement, differentiate certified products in energy and non-energy dimensions, and charge a price premium on...

We estimate whether consumers respond to local energy costs when purchasing appliances. Using a dataset from an appliance retailer, we compare demand responsiveness to a measure of energy costs that varies with local energy prices versus purchase prices. We strongly reject that consumers are...

Quantifying heterogeneity in consumers' misperceptions of product costs is crucial for policy design. We illustrate this point in the energy context and the design of Pigouvian policies. We estimate non-parametric distributions of perceptions of energy costs in the U.S. appliance market using a...

In credence goods markets, experts have better information about the appropriate quality of treatment than their customers. As experts provide both diagnosis and treatment, this leaves scope for fraud. We experimentally investigate how intensity of price competition and the level of customer...