Kyriakopoulou, Efthymia
- Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- University of Luxembourg
Research article2018Peer reviewedOpen access
Coria, Jessica; Kyriakopoulou, Efthymia
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/).
Environmental regulations; Energy efficiency; Size distribution; Emission taxes; Emission standards; Performance standards
Energy Economics
2018, Volume: 72, pages: 470-485
SDG7 Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
SDG8 Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
SDG9 Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
SDG12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Economics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2018.04.025
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/96160