What Triggers Environmental Management and Innovation? Empirical Evidence for Germany

29 Pages Posted: 21 Jun 2004

See all articles by Manuel Frondel

Manuel Frondel

RWI Leibniz Institute for Economic Research ; Ruhr University Bochum (RUB)

Jens Horbach

University of Applied Sciences Anhalt

Klaus Rennings

Center for European Economic Research (ZEW)

Date Written: 2004

Abstract

It is frequently hypothesized that environmental management systems (EMSs) may improve a firm's environmental performance. Whether or not this hypothesis is true is as important from the perspective of environmental policy as questions relating to the relevant incentives for (1) a firm's voluntary adoption of an EMS and (2) its environmental innovation behavior. Based on ample empirical evidence for German manufacturing, this paper addresses these issues on the basis of a recursive bivariate probit model that explicitly takes into account that a facility's decision on innovation activities is correlated with the decision on EMS certification. Our empirical results indicate that environmental innovation activities are not associated with EMS certification nor any other single policy instrument. Rather, innovation behavior seems to be correlated to the stringency of environmental policy.

Keywords: Environmental Technological Change, Environmental Management

JEL Classification: O33, O38, Q28

Suggested Citation

Frondel, Manuel and Horbach, Jens and Rennings, Klaus, What Triggers Environmental Management and Innovation? Empirical Evidence for Germany (2004). RWI Discussion Paper No. 15, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=556945 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.556945

Manuel Frondel (Contact Author)

RWI Leibniz Institute for Economic Research ( email )

Hohenzollernstr. 1-3
45128 Essen
Germany

Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) ( email )

Universitätsstraße 150
Bochum, NRW 44780
Germany

Jens Horbach

University of Applied Sciences Anhalt ( email )

Pfarrsteig 4
Lichtenfels 96215
Germany

Klaus Rennings

Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) ( email )

P.O. Box 10 34 43
L 7,1 D-68161 Mannheim
Germany

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
310
Abstract Views
2,843
Rank
178,568
PlumX Metrics