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Circular economy (CE) describes a concept that aims at saving resources by minimizing the use of material and energy over the entire life‐cycle of products, including production and repair, as well as reuse and recycling. CE innovations help to realize the goals of sustainable development by targeting environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability. This paper looks at the economic and social dimensions by investigating whether firms with CE innovations perform better or worse in terms of sales growth and employment. Our econometric analysis uses data from two waves of the German part of the Community Innovation Survey. Quantile regressions show that CE innovations are positively linked to turnover and employment growth. While there is no statistically significant impact on labor productivity, at the same time, firms with CE innovations show a significantly better financial standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the effects of energy-related technologies on economic performance at firm level. We distinguish clearly between adoption and use of energy-related technologies (process innovation in the broad sense) and product innovation in energy-related fields. We take into consideration four energy-related policy instruments (and expected demand for energy-related new products and services). We investigate the possibility of indirect effects of policy on performance via adoption or innovation by interacting adoption and innovation variables with policy instrument dummies. We test our hypotheses not only for the pooled data but also separately for the three countries (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) that are taken into consideration in this study. We find a positive direct effect of investment expenditures for energy-related technologies on labour productivity – that measure intensity of adoption of energy-related technologies – and a positive indirect effect of energy taxes via investment in energy-related technologies. Further, we find positive direct and indirect effects of regulation , standards and voluntary agreements via the adoption of production-related technologies and for technologies for the generation of renewal energy sources . We find neither direct nor indirect effects of the sales of innovative energy-related products – that measure product innovation in energy-related products – on labour productivity. No differences among the three countries could be detected with respect to investment in energy-related technologies and sales of innovative energy-related products. The indirect effects of regulation and standards and voluntary agreements can be primarily traced back to German firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]