A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW FOR GREEN PRODUCT TERM: FROM DEFINITION TO EVALUATION

Nowadays, interest in corporate environmental strategies shifts from cleaner processes to the holistic nature of green products. The relevant literature argues that firms have the opportunity to pioneer through green product innovation, allowing them to differentiate and thus gain competitive advantage. Environmental burden of products during their entire life cycle is undeniable. Due to the weakness of the existing literature that inadequately addresses a commonly accepted green product definition, as well as the thereby caused inconclusive academic empirical results on firms' competitiveness, there are many cases of businesses greenwashing behavior. The overall contribution of this exploratory paper, on determining and evaluating the degree of greenness of a product, is twofold; first, starting with a systematic literature review, authors further contribute by proposing an integrative definition that addresses the so far existing terminological gap. Next, after reviewing the existing environmental assessment tools, authors based on the developed definition and in accordance to its dynamic dimension contribute to the existing methodology, as the paper reveals issues that need to be considered in the evaluation of green products.     

New approaches in transportation planning: happiness and transport economics

The measurement of social and psychological phenomena has been advanced by recent progress in the fields of behavioural economics and hedonic psychology. In addition, the increased interest in understanding how individuals perceive their own quality of life, has led to investigating the relations between various macro and individual level variables, generically subsumed as happiness. For many “happiness is considered to be an ultimate goal in life” and it plays an important role in the way people perceive the overall society they live in. Therefore, social scientists and behavioural economists are now stressing the importance of well-being measures, related to people’s evaluations of their quality of life in addition to economic indicators. In the transport sector, project evaluation is mainly based on cost–benefit analyses using economic indicators. However, any provided transportation project/service impacts the quality of the travel experience, the well-being of travellers and their travel behaviour. Competitiveness of modes may be also affected by the promotion of derived or experienced travellers’ well-being. Thus, existing behavioural travel choice models should be enhanced with regards to their behavioural validity incorporating the impacts of travelling happiness/ satisfaction. This study aims to understand and model the impact of stated (anticipated) happiness in the decision choice between a private transport mode—car, and a public transport mode—metro.     

The Impact of Carbon Performance on Climate Change Disclosure

In the light of the significant role of environmental accounting in sustainable development, this study examines whether climate change disclosure reflects a firm's environmental performance. The novelty of the study stands on the approaches adopted to describe environmental performance. The first approach concerns performance in terms of output, direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, while the second one is based on environmental intention of mitigating climate change, including climate change policy and emission reduction initiatives. The Climate Performance Leadership Index is employed as a measure for climate change disclosure level, incorporating initiatives contributing to climate change mitigation, adaptation and transparency. Ordered logit regression is the appropriate methodology for the data employed concerning firms listed on FTSE 350. According to our findings, environmental performance for both adopted approaches entails a positive effect on climate change disclosure, a result that is consistent with voluntary disclosure theory. It is inferred that firms cannot manipulate their information reflecting their actual environmental performance and adopting a forthright and factual attitude towards sustainable development. Finally, findings provide an insight into managers' strategic behavior towards climate change issues. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

CO2 Emissions and Financial Performance of Socially Responsible Firms: An Empirical Survey

A firm's financial performance is closely related to its environmental behavior. This result is valid especially in the case of socially responsible firms. In the present study a data econometric analysis is conducted based on a GARCH model for socially responsible and conventional firms. According to our findings, the performance of socially responsible firms is negatively related to an increase of global CO₂ emissions. The firms' costs for implementing environmental policies and the investors' attitude towards the aforementioned firms may account for our results. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Relative labor demand in an open economy

This paper contributes to the discussion concerning the nature of the well-documented worsening of wage and employment inequality in western economies during the past three decades. It critically discusses the use of the traditional Heckscher and Ohlin approach to analyze the distributional effects of international competition. The paper also discusses an innovative theoretical scenario in order to effectively explain the empirical observations. The model overcomes the problem of a dichotomized labor market, which is an unfavorable result of the traditional approach. Furthermore, the factor-biased character of the technological change becomes endogenous as the strength of foreign competition and the induced incentives for technical innovations are taken into consideration. This paper was presented at the 55th International Atlantic Economic Conference, Vienna, Austria, March 12–16, 2003.