The purpose of this project is to assess the impact of adopting environmental standards and the reasons encouraging companies to adopt them despite their voluntary nature. We would therefore look at the changes in domestic sales as well as in exports and mark-ups before and after the certification of companies, taking advantage of the availability of data from 1992 to 2017. As the adoption of these standards represents a cost for the companies and since they are voluntary, we also want to understand what pushes a company to adopt them. Thus, we would like to determine whether the adoption of these standards allows companies to improve their reputation and to signal the better quality of their products to customers and therefore being able to apply a higher price and gain additional market share by differentiating themselves from their competitors.
