Enerji ve çevre ekonomisi üzerine üç makale

This thesis consists of three independent empirical essays on energy and environmental economics for OECD countries. The first paper explores the impacts of environmental policy stringency index (EPS) (and its subcomponents) on FDI inflows through novel panel data techniques in 26 OECD countries covering 1995-2012. According to findings, variables move together in the long-run. Besides, we find that an increase in aggregate EPS and non-market EPS decrease FDI inflows in these countries. The second essay has three main aims: a) constructing an energy intensity, energy efficiency, and activity indexes through the decomposition analysis for 27 OECD countries for 1971-2018, b) detecting the stochastic convergence behavior of energy efficiency index through recent panel data techniques that consider both sharp and smooth breaks, and c) estimating the income and price elasticities of these three energy indexes. Our empirical findings demonstrate that an improvement in the energy intensity can be attributed to the increase in energy efficiency rather than a change in economic composition in OECD countries. Besides, the findings show that most of the countries' energy efficiency index does not converge to the OECD average. We also find that per capita income level negatively affects both the energy intensity index and the energy efficiency index for most countries. The last paper examines the impact of income level, disaggregated energy consumption, types of globalization level, and urbanization on per capita ecological footprint by utilizing machine learning techniques for 27 OECD countries during 1971-2016. The empirical results exhibit that oil product consumption, electricity consumption, and GDP are the most significant variables for our model. These findings have important implications for both developed and developing countries for designing proper energy and environmental policies.