SANIN Maria Eugenia

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.

Countries are implementing policies to develop greener energy markets worldwide. In Europe, the “2030 Energy and Climate Package” asks for further reductions of green house gases, renewable sources integration, and energy efficiency targets. But the polluting intensity of electricity may be different in average than when considering market inefficiencies, in particular losses, and therefore the implemented policy must take those differences into account. Precisely, herein we study the importance in terms of CO2 emissions the extra amount of energy necessary to cover losses. With this purpose we use Spanish market and system data with hourly frequency from 2011 to 2013. Our results show that indeed electricity losses significantly explain CO2 emissions, with a higher CO2 emissions rate when covering losses than the average rate of the system. Additionally, we find that the market closing technologies used to cover losses have a positive and significant impact on CO2 emissions: when polluting technologies (coal or combined cycle) close the market, the impact of losses on CO2 emissions is high compared to the rest of technologies (combined heat and power, renewables or hydropower). To the light of these results we make some policy recommendations to reduce the impact of losses on CO2 emissions.

This paper studies merger incentives for polluting Cournot firms under a competitive tradable emission permits market. We find that when firms are symmetric and marginal costs are constant, an horizontal merger is welfare enhancing if efficiency gains are high enough for the merger to take place. The presence of a competitive (or monopolistic) outside market that also trades in the permits market makes profitable a merger that would not happen otherwise. When firms are vertically related in an input-output chain, an horizontal merger in one of the markets increases profits in the other market due to the permits price decrease. Finally we consider an oligopoly-fringe model in which firms differ in their marginal production costs. A merger between the dominant oligopolistic firms decreases the permits price and is always profitable. Such setting is relevant to assess the observed mergers between power generators in several market for permits, like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), allowing us to derive some policy recommendations.

The issue of fuel poverty is of growing interest in the economic, political and social spheres. This thesis in economics focuses on the representation and analysis of the interactions of three fundamental items in the constrained expenses of households, namely health, housing, and energy, in order to reveal relevant levers for the implementation of actions to combat fuel poverty. This paper proposes an original theoretical and analytical analysis, by approaching this phenomenon in terms of equity, thus highlighting the existence of inequalities and justifying the implementation of complementary, or even new, measures in favor of greater equity between individuals with regard to the energy good. On the other hand, characterizing the dynamics of this phenomenon provides valuable information on the type of measures (i.e., bill payment assistance, innovative bill payment methods, housing renovation assistance) that can be put in place to counteract this phenomenon, and thus participate in the pursuit of the underlying equity objectives. Secondly, the analysis of the consequences of fuel poverty on other dimensions than those referring to energy (i.e., health) allows policy makers to question its multidimensional and porous aspect with other dimensions of social precariousness. This phenomenon is a vector contributing to the aggravation of other inequalities (i.e., health inequalities), which can thus compromise the pursuit of the equity objective of public decision-makers. Finally, the study of new and innovative means of payment for the energy good (i.e., prepayment), at lower costs, allows us to identify prepayment as a tool that can contribute to the achievement of the objectives of horizontal and vertical equity respectively.

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between exchange rate (ER) regimes and volatility of real exchange rate depreciation (RERD), comparing the G7 and 17 Latin American (LA17) countries, during 1970-2010. We estimate a panel autoregressive model with generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) errors and regime-specific effects on both the conditional mean and conditional variance. For the G7, we find that, relative to the fixed ER regime, only the freely floating regime shows higher RERD volatility. under the managed floating regime the RERD is equally volatile and under the crawling peg it is actually less volatile. Instead, in the case of the LA17, more flexible ER regimes are associated with more volatile RERD rates, with higher volatility under the managed floating regime than under the crawling peg and with extremely high volatility under the freely falling ER regime.

We study the short-term price behavior of Phase 2 EU emission allowances. We model returns and volatility dynamics, and we demonstrate that a standard ARMAX-GARCH framework is inadequate for this modeling and that the gaussianity assumption is rejected due to a number of outliers. To improve the fitness of the model, we combine the underlying price process with an additive stochastic jump process. We improve the model's performance by introducing a time-varying jump probability that is explained by two variables: the daily relative change in the volume of transactions and the European Commission's announcements regarding the supply of permits. We show that (i) sharp increases in volume have led to increased volatility during the April 2005-December 2007 period but not for the period beginning in January 2008, and (ii) announcements induce jumps in the process that tend to increase volatility across both periods. Thus, authorities face a trade off between disseminating information effectively and promoting market stability. (c) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In this paper we analyse the impact of supply and demand factors on EUA Phase II future prices, with a particular emphasis on the European Commission announcements regarding the organisation of Phase II and Phase III of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme. Using two different methodologies we find strong significance of EC announcements in particular regarding the National Allocation Plans and the cap for Phase III. Our results are particularly relevant to the light of the decisions that the EC must take to achieve the 20-20-20 objectives.

In December 2010, France approved the law "Nouvelle Organisation du Marché de l'Electricité" (or NOME law) to promote competition in the retail electricity market. In practice, the law allows retailers to buy nuclear production from the incumbent, at a regulated access price. This mechanism works up to a ceiling of 100 terawatt hours, which represents one quarter of the incumbent's production from nuclear plants. Each retailer is assigned a share of that amount proportionally to its portfolio of clients. We contribute to the debate raised by the NOME law regarding the evolution of retail market prices. We show that a price decrease results if the ceiling is sufficiently high compared to the market share of the retailers competing with the incumbent. This pro-competitive effect is stronger when the incumbent's rivals take into account the impact of their market strategy on the redistribution rule. Finally, we find that, if the regulated price of the NOME electricity is set above the nuclear cost, the incumbent realizes a gain that may result in strategic withholding, weakening the pro-competitive effects of the law.