Firms' environmental management practices, innovations and social welfare.

Summary The work in this thesis focuses on the effect of the adoption of voluntary environmental practices by firms on their innovation performance and on the social welfare of countries. This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 shows that the adoption of these environmental practices has a positive impact on product innovation. Moreover, this impact is all the more important the earlier these practices are implemented. Chapter 2 asks whether the environmental practices of firms enable them to overcome the obstacles to innovation (defined here in a general way). To this end, Chapter 2 distinguishes three types of barriers: financial, human and market. It concludes that the implementation of green practices allows firms to overcome the financial and human barriers that can slow down innovation activities. However, the adoption of green practices is neutral with respect to market barriers. Chapter 3 analyzes the effect on environmental innovation of the implementation of two knowledge management practices: a written knowledge management policy and a knowledge sharing culture. He shows that these two knowledge management practices each improve green innovation. However, it seems that a culture of knowledge sharing within the firm plays a more significant role in green innovation than a written policy, and because green practices are also management tools from the firm's perspective, they may not be neutral for employees. Chapter 4 thus focuses on the impact of the adoption of environmental practices on psychosocial risk. Finally, chapter 5 uses a theoretical model of vertical differentiation to investigate whether, in terms of social welfare, cooperation in setting an international eco-label criterion is preferable to the situation where two national labels coexist. The results show that the overall surplus in the case of one international label criterion is always greater than or equal to the overall surplus in the case of two national labels. However, this improvement is at the expense of one of the two countries.