Optimal dynamic environmental policies of a profit maximizing firm

In this paper we study the optimal environmental policy of the firm for different scenarios dependent on (costs of) production technologies, financing costs, and governmental policy. The governmental instruments to be considered are:

Location decisions of a polluting firm and the time consistency of environmental policy

This paper considers location decisions of a monopolist, who faces a tax on its emissions in the home country, under ex post that is, time consistent, and ex ante, that is precommitment, environmental policies. We show that the monopolist will relocate more often under ex post optimal emission taxes. A government which cannot commit to an ex ante emission tax and sets its tax ex post after abatement effort has been chosen, is unable to affect the monopolist’s location decision, because it cannot commit to strategically reduce its tax level in the first stage. Domestic welfare is often higher under ex post emission taxes whenever the monopolist relocates under both policy regimes. Otherwise, welfare is higher under government commitment to an ex ante emission tax level. Thus, government commitment to a policy is not always welfare improving.     

Pigouvian tax,abatement policies and uncertainty on the environment

The paper examines the effects of environmental uncertainty on Pigouvian tax and abatement policy used, either separately or contemporaneously, to counteract pollution. We discuss these effects by introducing three kinds of risk: risk on the environmental quality, risk on the impact of pollution and risk on the impact of abatement. For each case we determine the conditions ensuring that risk increases the size of public intervention and provide an economic interpretation and some parallelisms with other risk problems. The last part of the paper generalizes some of our results to the case of N-th order risk changes.     

The EU ETS and corporate environmental abatement

This article studies the relationship between firm-level emissions-to-cap ratio (ETC) and environmental abatement, by using a unique and extensive data set of 10 762 installations covered by the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) matched to 5931 firms. We find that a shortage of emissions allowances is related to more abatement in later years while a surplus of emissions allowances results in worse subsequent environmental performance. This finding underscores the importance of reducing the global amount of allowances in the ETS system. Our results also suggest that stakeholder pressure and the creation of transparency concerning corporate environmental performance are likely to support the effectiveness of the system.     

The impact of fiscal policies on agricultural household decisions

This paper provides a comparative static analysis of farm household's production, consumption, and labor market decisions under alternative tax policies. We explore the implications of non-separable household decisions caused by widespread non-participation in labor, land, financial and/or food markets, as is typical of low income economies. The analytical results indicate that when labor market imperfections occur, most tax-induced responses are ambiguous, mainly due to shadow price effects. This is particularly the case for the labor market and production responses to most tax tools under study, while a decreasing demand for consumption goods appears to be the result in several cases. Furthermore, tax-induced allocation effects may differ between the non-separable and the separable model versions, indicating the potential impact of labor market constraints on farm household responses to tax policies. In particular, standard taxes as well as a land tax may imply production adjustments in the case of non-separability.     

Real option analysis for effects of emission permit banking on investment under abatement cost uncertainty

The present paper analyzes the investment effects of emission trading scheme (ETS) when emission permits are bankable and there is technological uncertainty with regard to the abatement cost. A real option model is employed to accommodate irreversibility of investment and cost uncertainty. In the absence of abatement cost uncertainty, a bankable ETS reduces a firm's incentive for environmental investment, because the firm can utilize the banked permits for future compliance which act as substitutes for abatement investment. However, when cost uncertainty is prevalent, investment may reduce the opportunity cost of irreversible investment under the banking system, thereby increasing a firm's investment incentive. The condition is derived under which a bankable ETS provides higher investment incentives than a non-bankable ETS does.     

The effects of cash flow and size on the investment decisions of ICT firms: A dynamic approach

This paper examines one of the fastest growing industries in our world today, the ICT industry. We assess the sensitivity of a firm’s investment to a set of financial determinants, by developing a flexible adjustment dynamic model. In particular, we examine the degree to which a firm’s liquidity influences firm investment and whether firm size and firm specialization have any additional implications. Moreover, the effect of the dot-com burst is also considered. For a panel of ICT and non-ICT US companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange, the results reveal the following: (1) all firms are sensitive to the availability of internal funds; (2) investment intensity decreases with firm size; (3) and leverage negatively affects investment for ICT firms.     

The impact of governance and transparency on firm investment in Vietnam

A large literature asserts a causal relationship between the quality of economic governance and economic performance. However, attempts to establish such a link at an aggregate level have met with considerable methodological criticism. This paper seeks to overcome this limitation. We match a panel of Vietnamese enterprises from 2006 to 2010 with a unique panel dataset measuring sub‐national economic governance to estimate a relationship between local governance and private investment. We do not find a significant relationship between investment and most traditional forms of governance. However, there is one important exception – transparency, especially the public posting of planning documents, is strongly associated with higher investment across a range of different specifications. Our results have significant implications for policy, given the prevailing theory that changes in the quality of local economic governance will spur improved economic performance.     

The economic policy uncertainty and firm investment in Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the Australian firm investment activity. We find a significant positive relationship between the EPU and the firm investment over 2002 to 2017 period. Our main results remain unchanged after several endogeneity tests. Further analysis reveals that this relationship becomes pronounced for firms if their headquarters located in small states, firms with more tangible assets, higher operating cash flows and cash holdings, higher profits and leverage, but firms with fewer dividend payouts. Our paper sheds lights on the unique attribute of the impact of the EPU on the Australian firm investment activity and offers important policy and managerial implications.     

The impact of debt restructuring on firm investment: Evidence from China

This paper empirically investigates the causal effects of debt restructuring on firm investment using the propensity matching score with difference-in-difference (PSM-DID) method based on the panel data of listed companies in China from 2005 to 2016. The results show that the impact of debt restructuring on firm investment are heterogeneous among different property rights, industry natures, restructuring payment modes and amounts, and debt renegotiation characteristics. Our analyses indicate that debt restructuring has a more significant impact on promoting investment efficiency for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), firms in industries with excess capacity, and debt-restructuring firms that pay off debts with assets. Debt restructuring significantly aggravates overinvestment when the amount of debt restructuring is large. When shareholder bargaining power is higher than that of debtholders in the debt renegotiation, debt restructuring has a significant inhibitory effect on underinvestment. Smaller debt renegotiation frictions exacerbate underinvestment and help mitigate overinvestment. This paper provides a new perspective for understanding the rationality of debt restructuring and has implications for policymakers and corporate decision makers aiming to improve debt governance and investment efficiency.     

Consumer support for environmental policies: An application to purchases of green cars

This paper focuses on how consumer motivation can be tapped in order to encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies. Consumers are heterogeneous — they may be guided by intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation. While information provision policies (such as the energy label for cars) may be effective in encouraging certain consumers to adopt green cars, financial incentive schemes (such as subsidies or fines) may be more persuasive for extrinsically-motivated consumers. We develop a dynamic theory of adoption of environmental innovations, in which information-provision policies are followed by financial incentives (first ‘carrot’, then ‘stick’ incentives). Analysis of a survey dataset of Swiss households observes considerable heterogeneity in terms of support of information-provision or financial incentive policies, in line with our conjectures. Our results will be of particular interest to policymakers interested in guiding consumers towards cleaner technologies.     

The impact of corporate debt on long term investment and firm performance

Prior research indicates a linkage between debt, research and development (R&D) and physical investment, and that the relationship varies depending on the type of firm (science versus non–science). Leverage also plays a multidimensional role in corporate performance and growth. The relationship between financial leverage and R&D expenditure is analysed using a sample of large United States (US) manufacturing firms. Then, the impact of leverage on R&D expenditure is studied using corporate performance drivers as intermediate variables. The results indicate that there is a strong negative relationship between the degree of financial leverage and the level of R&D expenditure that firms undertake. The negative relationship is robust to changes in model specifications and sample periods. More importantly, the results show that it is higher leverage that leads to lower R&D expense rather than R&D causing variations in future leverage. In addition, the results indicate that higher leverage adversely influences future investment in R&D which may in turn lead to negative impact on long term operating performance and future growth opportunities.     

Induced technological change and the attractiveness of CO2 abatement policies

This paper investigates the significance of induced technological change (ITC) for the attractiveness of CO₂ abatement policies. We use analytical and numerical general equilibrium models in which technological change results from profit-maximizing investments in R&D. We show that carbon abatement policies have very different impacts on R&D across industries, and do not necessarily raise the economy-wide rate of technological progress. Focusing only on the sectors with positive R&D impacts can lead to substantial underassessment of the GDP costs of CO₂ abatement policies. The presence of ITC implies lower costs of achieving a given abatement target, but it implies higher gross costs (costs before netting out environment-related benefits) of a given carbon tax. Gross costs depend importantly on the efficiency of R&D markets prior to the introduction of CO₂ policies.     

Capacity investment and green R&D in a dynamic oligopoly under the potential shift in environmental damage

We develop a differential oligopoly game to investigate firms’ capacity investment and green R&D efforts in the presence of the potential shift in environmental damage and under the spillover effect of R&D activities among firms. We find that when both the probability of potential shift in environmental damage and the efficacy of R&D activities are high, the spillover effect will discourage the R&D effort but encourage the capacity investment. Otherwise, the spillover effect will encourage the R&D effort but discourage the capacity investment. Moreover, the potential shift in environmental damage can significantly impact the capacity and green R&D decisions as well as the Pigouvian tax, especially in the case of a large number of firms, a high profitability of the product, a high level of interest rate, and a high level of R&D spillover among firms.     

Overlooked alternatives in managerial investment decisions: a reply

Some empirical evidence on the question of product differentiation in the market for audits is presented. Using agency cost and signalling frameworks we posit that there will be a demand for varying levels of audit quality. Because audit quality is not directly observable to investors we postulate that quality will be proxied by the auditor's brand name reputation. Big Eight auditors are categorized as being high quality producers. Using data on companies newly listing on the New Zealand Stock Exchange we test the derived models of auditor choice. Auditor choice is a dummy variable (0,1) partitioned on the basis of non Big Eight and Big Eight accounting firms. The results provide support for the idea of product differentiation in the market for audits.     

Optimal combination of pollution prevention and abatement policies: The case of agricultural drainage

The adoption of pollution prevention and abatement practices is examined in the context of a model of exhaustible resource use with a backstop technology. For the sake of concreteness, the paper focuses on the problem of water-logging caused by the subsurface accumulation of agricultural drainwater. In modelling this problem, a region's underground capacity to store drainwater is considered an exhaustible resource, while the installation of subsurface drainage is viewed as the corresponding backstop technology (or abatement practice). The exhaustible resource is typically over-exploited due to common access problems, which forces a suboptimally fast adoption of the abatement practice. Conservationist irrigation technologies, such as drip and sprinkler systems, tend to reduce drainwater generation, and their adoption could increase social welfare by delaying the abatement stage. Public policies are suggested to increase the adoption of such conservationist technologies. Data from California is used to illustrate the results and to demonstrate the efficacy of the model for policy purposes. While the setting used for the analysis in this paper is quite specific (i.e., water-logging), the same general modelling ideas may be applied to many other problems of environmental degradation.     

The interaction of investment and financing decisions under moral hazard

This paper examines how debt-induced risk shifting arising in the labor choice contributes to the interaction between investment and financing decisions. Due to equity's limited liability, increased use of debt leads to labor over-utilization compared with all-equity financing. In turn, increasing leverage to finance investment has no effect on the cost but, via labor, influences the expected benefit of marginal investment by affecting the size of shareholders' claim while reducing its likelihood. If the equity claim is reduced, investment and debt are inversely related; otherwise they could be positively related. The linkage between debt and investment exists because both are chosen anticipating the subsequent optimal labor choice, all three decisions are made before price uncertainty is resolved, and equity flotation costs exist.     

Policy modeling on the GDP spillovers of carbon abatement policies between China and the United States

This paper simulates the GDP spillover effects between China and U.S. caused by the implementation of different climate protection policies. It is based on a combination of several climate protection models, which are the State-contingent Model and the Demeter Model, and the GDP Spillovers Model, known as the Mundell–Fleming model. From the simulation results, it is concluded that whether the United States implements policies on increasing carbon sink or not makes very little difference on the total output in the U.S. and the GDP spillovers toward China. However, the spillover impact of American carbon abatement policies on China experiences a varying trend that rises from negative to positive. These simulation results show that the climate protection policies of one country will have positive impact on the GDP spillovers of another country in the long term. This paper is focused on two conditions while simulating the GDP for both China and the U.S. Condition A within the simulations ignores the impact of GDP spillovers of foreign countries, while condition B takes the impact of GDP spillovers of foreign countries into consideration. Furthermore, this paper presents the simulated GDP of China and the U.S. under different scenarios and analyzes the level of GDP spillovers between the two countries. This paper concludes that carbon abatement policies in the U.S. have a larger and more noticeable GDP spillover effects to China.     

Corporate taxation and the optimal investment decisions of firms

The effects of a corporate profits tax on the choice of technique depends on the criterion used to make this choice. Harberger concluded that it would alter the optimal techniques because he was implicitly assuming that firms try to maximise the internal rate of return on their investment. Stiglitz, using the maximisation of present value criterion, with a rate of interest lower than the rate of profits, concluded that the optimal techniques would not be affected by this tax. The appropriate criterion depends on the assumptions made about the scope for entrepreneurial activity and its relation to capital.