We examine information provision as a public policy instrument when products generate damages to consumers as well as environmental externalities. We show that information provision dominates taxation in terms of welfare, if information can be provided at low cost. This is because a uniform tax...

We examine information provision as a public policy instrument when products generate damages to consumers as well as environmental externalities. We show that information provision dominates taxation in terms of welfare, if information can be provided at low cost. This is because a uniform tax...

Emissions taxes, tradeable emission permits and voluntary compliance policies are becoming the instruments of choice in controlling environmental problems at the national and international level. Careful design of these policies in second-best environments is a very important factor for their...

We show that the presence of transaction costs in emission permit markets challenges the common presumption that grandfathering permits corresponds to lump-sum transfers with no strategic effects on output. Fixed transaction-costs influence firms’ decision to participate in the permits market,...

The paper considers a market currently dominated by a dirty technology that imposes significant environmental costs. A clean technology, with zero environmental costs, is introduced after the maturity of the dirty technology’s network. Adoption of the clean technology is not possible due to...

In the present paper, we analyse the interaction of a competitive market for emission permits with an oligopolistic product market. It is well known that a competitive permits market achieves the cost minimizing distribution of abatement effort among the polluting firms for a given reduction in...