Can Environmental Regulations be Good for Business? An Assessment of the Porter Hypothesis

By Stefan Ambec, Philippe Barla. 2005

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The P011er hypothesis asserts that polluting firms can benefit from environmental policies, arguing that well-designed environmental regulations stimulate innovation. This is achieved by increasing either productivity or product value which lead s to private benefits. As a consequence, environmental regulations would benefit both society and regulated firms. This point of view has found a receptive audience among policy makers and the popular press but has been severely criticized by economists. In this paper, we present some of the arguments in th is debate and review the empirical evidence available so far in the economic literature.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68f4912e54c0772a25c5a8e62dc7e932eea47699

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Citations in the corpus

Environmental Innovations, Local Networks and Internationalization (2012, background): “Email: mzzmsm@unife.it On the other hand, EIs have been argued to be important drivers of the competitiveness of firms (Porter & Van der Linde, 1995; Ambec & Barla, 2002, 2006; Wagner, 2006; Ambec et al., 2010; Porter, 2010).”
Environmental policy without costs? : A review of the Porter hypothesis (2009, background): “…the authors have analyzed the effects on net exports, the decision of where to 15 As already noted there are a number of research overviews of the Porter hypothesis (see e.g. Marklund, 1997; Mulatu, 2001; Wagner, 2003; Lundgren 2004; Ambec and Barla, 2006). locate production, and the flow of trade.”
Environmental regulations, innovation and firm performance: A revisit of the Porter hypothesis (2017, background): “The idea that environmental regulations can improve a firm’s environmental and financial performance via their impact on innovation has become known as the Porter hypothesis or the win–win hypothesis (Ambec and Barla, 2006).”
Economic Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility (2012, background): “…report no systematic evidence that environmental performance motivates innovation, and the preponderance of empirical economic studies favor a mild negative relationship between environmental performance and overall competitiveness (Ja¤e et al. 1995, Ambec and Barla 2006, and Pasurka 2008).”
Does the Porter Hypothesis Explain Expected Future Financial Performance? The Effect of Clean Water Regulation on Chemical Manufacturing Firms (2010, background): “In particular, this survey cites Ambec and Barla (2007a), Brännlund et al. (1995), Brunnermeier and Levinson (2004), D’Aspremont and Jacquemin (1988), Dufour et al. (1998), Gabel and Sinclair-Desgagne (1998), Kennedy (1994), Mohr (2002), and Simpson and Bradford (1996).”
Environmental Policy, Innovation and Performance : New Insights on the Porter Hypothesis (2011, unknown): “A more complete review can be found in Ambec and Barla (2006), Ambec and Lanoie (2007).”
The Porter Hypothesis at 20: Can Environmental Regulation Enhance Innovation and Competitiveness? (2010, unknown): “1997, Ambec and Barla, 2007) or rationally bounded (Gabel and Sinclair-Desgagné, 1998). He or she therefore misses good investment opportunities (from the point of view of the firm’s profit) because they are too risky, too costly (for the manager but not for the firm) or out of the manager’s habits ”
Does It Pay to Be Green? A Systematic Overview (2008, background): “Ambec and Lanoie (2007) summarized several empirical papers that fit into these two sets. In the first set of papers, Jaffe and Palmer (1997) estimated the relationship between total R&D expenditures (or the number of successful patent applications) and pollution abatement costs (a proxy for the str”