What triggers environmental management and innovation? Empirical evidence for Germany

Manuel Frondel, Jens Horbach and Klaus Rennings

Ecological Economics, 2008, vol. 66, issue 1, 153-160

Abstract: It is frequently hypothesized that environmental management systems (EMSs) may improve firms' environmental innovation performance. Whether this hypothesis is true is as critical for environmental policy as questions pertaining 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 the simultaneity of these issues on the basis of a recursive bivariate probit model that explores the hypothesis that a facility's decision on innovation activities is correlated with the decision on EMS adoption. Our empirical results, indicating that environmental innovation activities are not associated with EMS implementation nor any other single policy instrument, reflect the perceptions of the survey respondents and, hence, should be interpreted as correlations rather than causal relationships. According to these perceptions, innovation behavior seems to be mainly correlated with the stringency of environmental policy.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (163)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921-8009(07)00442-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: What Triggers Environmental Management and Innovation? - Empirical Evidence for Germany (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:66:y:2008:i:1:p:153-160

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().