Presents findings from an investigation of the adoption of different “abatement” technologies in 30 Danish firms, encompassing traditional iron manufacturers and electroplating firms. The abatement measures were all instigated to improve environmental or occupational safety and health conditions. Reasons and incentives for these measures were investigated. Finds that there are big differences b...

We examine the impact of abatement taxes on the pollution level in a duopoly framework with endogenous market structure. We demonstrate that an increase in abatement taxes could trigger a regime-switch from joint ventures to Cournot competition, causing the pollution level to increase. Moreover, abatement taxes can implement the first best outcome if and only if the industry is not too pollutin...

This study proposes the use of marginal abatement cost curves to calculate environmental damages of agricultural systems in China's Loess Plateau. Total system costs and revenues, management characteristics and pollution attributes are imputed into a directional output distance function, which is then used to determine shadow prices and abatement cost curves for soil and nitrogen loss. Marginal...

Weak disposability of outputs means that firms can abate harmful emissions by decreasing the activity level. Modeling weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis has caused some confusion. This paper identifies a dilemma in these approaches: conventional formulations implicitly and unintentionally assume all firms apply uniform abatement factors. However, it is usually cost efficien...

While there are extensive theoretical studies on firms’ responses to environmental regulations and enforcement, there are few empirical analyses of firms’ expenditures on pollution abatement in responding to different regulations and enforcement strategies. This paper presents an empirical analysis of pollution abatement efforts of Chinese industrial firms under a combination of pollution charg...

Global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty with learning. We provide stochastic dominance theorems that provide new insights into when abatement and investment into low carbon technology should increase in risk. We show that R&D into lowcarbon technologies and near-term abatement are in some sense opposites in terms of risk. Abatement provides insuranc...

Non-strategic firms with rational expectations make investment and emissions decisions. The investment rule depends on firms’ beliefs about future emissions policies. We compare emissions taxes and quotas when the (strategic) regulator and (nonstrategic) firms have asymmetric information about abatement costs, and all agents use Markov Perfect decision rules. Emissions taxes create a secondary ...

Current debates on mitigation emphasize the role of the inertia of the economic system. Our aim in this paper is to study in more depth how sectorally dif ferentiated inertia impacts on optimal CO2-emission abatement policies. Using the STARTS model, we show that optimal abatement levels and costs differ sensibly among sectors. Differential inertia is the critical determinant of this trade-off,...