Tom Verbeke

Environmental Policy, Policy Uncertainty and Relocation Decisions

We analyze the relocation decision of a monopolist under various assumptions with respect to the difference in environmental policy stringency between the home and foreign country. We show that relocation because of such a difference is highly unlikely in a model that includes uncertainty with respect to the difference in policy stringency. Relocation is however possible if the difference in other production costs is significant. We also show the potential for hysteresis-effects: once relocated, the firm will require a reduction in the difference of environmental policy stringency that is larger than the increase that lead to the relocation decision.

The EKC: Some really disturbing Monte Carlo evidence

Abstract In many fields of the economics discipline, much of the empirical work includes a thorough analysis of time series data. In environmental economics, however, such an analysis is often neglected. This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, as Lee and List (2004. Examining trends of criteria air pollutants: ere the effects of government intervention transitory? Environmental and Resource Economics 29 (1), 21–37) argue, time series analysis can provide many new insights relevant in modelling work or in forwarding policy advice. Secondly, the nature of the time series has a profound impact on the modelling work. This paper shows that such an analysis is a necessity. We illustrate this with a Monte Carlo investigation of an Environmental Kuznets type of transition between non-stationary variables. The Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis posits an inverse U-shaped relation between environmental pollution and income. Although both pollution and income may be stochastically trending, the empirical literature has largely ignored this property. Through Monte Carlo experiments we show that with stochastically trending series, regression analysis spuriously confirms the EKC hypothesis in 40% of the cases.

Evaluating Environmental and Resource Economics Journals: A TOP-Curve Approach

This article applies an alternative approach to the measurement of scholarly quality, namely the use of TOP-curves, in order to rank journals in the field of environmental and resource economics. This measure summarizes the incidence, intensity, and inequality of these journals’ highly cited articles. Moreover, TOP-curves allow analysts to rank journals according to TOP-dominance. The journal ranking based on the TOP-dominance criterion does not match the ranking based on the journals’ impact factors. Indeed, TOP-curves provide more detailed information on the relative ranking of journals since they take into account the composition and the distribution of citations within the top group.

What Distinguishes EMAS Participants? An Exploration of Company Characteristics

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to fill this gap by empirically investigating the business and financial characteristics, stakeholder pressure and public policies distinguishing companies that have implemented the European Eco-Management and Audit System (EMAS) and those that have not using a unique firm-level dataset of European publicly quoted companies. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First of all, the decision to implement EMAS has not been widely analysed. Secondly, we focus on European firms which allows us to assess if and to what extent European firms behave like their US or Japanese counterparts. We find that the EMAS participation decision is positively influenced by the solvency ratio, the share of non-current liabilities and the average labour cost. Also, two measures of company size are positively associated with EMAS participation: both the absolute company size as well as the relative size of a company compared to its sector average. The profit margin on the other hand exerts a negative influence according to our results. We further show that public policy can heavily influence the EMAS participation decision: companies whose headquarters is located in a member state that actively encourages EMAS have a higher probability of participation.