دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی سیاست زیست محیطی، پذیرش فناوری و توزیع اندازه شرکت ها - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

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.

6. Conclusions

In this paper we study the effects of the choice of policy instruments on the size distribution of firms, as well as on the incentives to invest in either energy-saving or neutral technologies. Imposing the same regulatory goal regarding the reduction of aggregate emissions, we have shown that each regulation affects firms of heterogeneous size differently, favoring either small or large firms. For instance, compared with taxes or performance standards, uniform emission standards are much more stringent for larger firms which despite using the input that generates emissions less intensively emit more than small firms in absolute terms. In contrast, performance standards and to a greater extent emission taxes are much more stringent for smaller firms than for larger firms. Moreover, we have shown that a different number of firms go out of business under different policy instruments.

To sum up, the internalization of the social cost coming from the polluting activity of firms leads to lower production levels for each “type” of firm. Emission taxes affect small firms with significantly low profits (needed to cover the fixed costs) the most, as the use of energy now becomes more expensive. Emission standards affect the most those large firms for which the standard is binding. These firms would have to distort their choice of inputs significantly as well as reduce their production and profits in order to comply with the standard. Finally, performance standards favor large firms that produce high levels of output and do not find the regulation so restrictive. Thus, compared with the other two policy instruments, they lead to higher aggregate output. Last but not the least, assuming that firms can invest in two different technologies, a neutral technology and an emission-saving-biased technology, we show that emission standards favor the use of emissions-saving technologies the most.