This paper examines the effects of environmental performance on financial performance using the data of Japanese manufacturing firms from 2004 to 2008. As the environmental performance, our study considers the two different environmental issues of waste and greenhouse gas emissions in capturing the effects of corporate environmental management on financial performance. In addition, to clarify how each financial performance responds to a firm's effort in dealing with different environmental issues, we utilize many financial performance indices reflecting various market evaluations. Our estimation results show the different effects of each environmental performance on financial performances. For example, while an increase in waste emissions generally improves financial performance, their reduction ameliorates financial performance in dirty industries. In addition, while greenhouse gas reduction leads to an increase in return on equity, it does not have a significant effect on return on sales which reflects the evaluation in the goods market, and it leads to a decrease in the natural logarithm of Tobin's q, which indicates the value of intangible assets.

This paper attempts to estimate the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in the case of France by taking the role of nuclear energy in electricity production into account. We adopt the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration as the estimation method. Additionally, we examine the stability of the estimated models and investigate the Granger causality relationships between the variables in the system. The results from our estimation provide evidence supporting the EKC hypothesis and the estimated models are shown to be stable over the sample period. The uni-direction running from other variables to CO 2 emissions are confirmed from the casualty tests. Specifically, the uni-directional causality relationship running from nuclear energy to CO 2 emissions statistically provides evidence on the important role of nuclear energy in reducing CO 2 emissions.

This paper empirically investigates the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for CO 2 emissions in the cases of 11 OECD countries by taking into account the role of nuclear energy in electricity production. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration is employed as the estimation method. Our results indicate that energy consumption has a positive impact on CO 2 emissions in most countries in the study. However, the impact of trade is not statistically significant. The results provide evidence for a role of nuclear power in reducing CO 2 emissions only in some countries. Additionally, although the estimated long-run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the EKC hypothesis in Finland, Japan, Korea and Spain, only Finland's EKC turning point is inside the sample period of the study, providing poor evidence in support of the EKC hypothesis.

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Our study empirically investigates the effects of the Kyoto Protocol's quantified emission limitation or reduction commitments on various greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions such as CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O and other greenhouse gases, consisting of HFCs, PFCs and SF 6 . These GHG emissions are considered to be the main source of global warming issues and 39 countries approved to meet the commitments by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. Our empirical analysis is based on the STIRPAT model, the stochastic version of the IPAT model, using the data of 119 countries in 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. Our main findings are that the effects of the commitments to the Kyoto Protocol (1) are significantly negative for the cases of CO 2 and CH 4 emissions, (2) are not significant for the case of N 2 O emissions and (3) are significantly positive for the case of other greenhouse gas emissions. These results have important policy implications for global warming issues.