Essays over de binnenlandse en internationale effecten van milieubeleid

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🔬研究者:The NLP-based measurement of climate policy attention and strategic disclosure provides a methodological template for future policy evaluation studies.

🏢実務担当者:Firms exposed to CBAM can anticipate competitive dynamics and strategic disclosure pressures based on the market reaction and Chinese firm behavior evidence.

🏛政策担当者:The meta-analysis on leakage mitigation instruments and the Chinese monitoring reform offer evidence-based guidance for designing effective climate policies.

The intensification of climate concerns has prompted governments to adopt increasingly varied regulatory and market-based instruments intended to reduce emissions while preserving economic growth. This dissertation investigates how such environmental and climate policies affect market outcomes including firm valuation, strategic behavior, and innovation, across both international and domestic settings. The analysis comprises four empirical studies, combining text-based machine-learning methods with econometric identification strategies to provide new evidence on the consequences of environmental regulation. The first three studies examine the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which addresses carbon leakage by pricing the emissions embodied in imported goods. The first conducts a meta-analysis of the numerical modeling literature, assembling 416 leakage-ratio estimates from 39 studies published between 2004 and 2022. Meta-regression estimates indicate that output-based rebating attains leakage mitigation comparable to that of border carbon adjustments. The second study estimates the response of U.S. equity markets to the CBAM announcement. Using a natural-language-processing measure of climate-policy attention constructed from NASDAQ financial news, it provides evidence that exposed firms in advanced economies may secure competitive gains under more stringent border carbon measures. The third study analyzes the strategic disclosure responses of Chinese firms through textual analysis of the Management Discussion and Analysis sections of their annual reports. Distinguishing disclosures concerning decarbonization from those concerning trade reallocation, and employing an event-study design with matched samples, it finds a significant increase in decarbonization disclosures among exposed firms and little evidence of trade reallocation. The fourth study turns to domestic regulation, evaluating an institutional reform of environmental monitoring of polluting firms in China. Motivated by the informational asymmetries that constrain enforcement, it assesses whether stronger monitoring induces green innovation, measured by green patent applications. A difference-in-differences design, supplemented by triple-differences estimation, yields robust evidence that enhanced monitoring significantly raises green innovation—particularly among privately owned firms—by increasing the detectability of noncompliance. Taken together, the studies integrate the international and domestic dimensions of environmental and climate policies. By extracting policy-relevant signals from large-scale textual data and combining them with credible identification strategies, the dissertation clarifies how policy shapes carbon leakage, firm valuation, strategic disclosure, and green innovation. Each study offers evidence-based implications for designing regulation that reconciles environmental objectives with economic growth and competitiveness.

• openalex https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/20.500.12942/787474first seen 2026-06-20 05:10:30