Many countries have followed a policy of being self-sufficient in electricity. However, in the last two decades exchange of electricity across borders has become more widespread, and the European Union's policy is to encourage a gradual expansion of crossborder trading and integration of...

Recent literature on biofuels has questioned whether biofuels policies are likely to reduce the negative effects of climate change. Our analysis explicitly takes into account that oil is a non-renewable natural resource. A blending mandate has no effect on total cumulative oil extraction....

There are plans of a substantial increase in the construction of renewable power in Scandinavia in the coming 10 years. The Nordic countries operate a common wholesale market, Nord Pool. Intermittent power (wind power, solar and small-scale hydro power) is stochastic and therefore needs other...

Comparative-statics results for financial options are often assumed to hold for real options. But the effects of higher volatility need not be increased value and postponed investment. This depends on signs of correlations and what parameters are held constant. For real options, the...

The European Union has introduced directives that aim to liberalize and integrate electricity and gas markets in Western Europe. While progress has been made, particularly in electricity markets, there have been setbacks: for example, because of concerns about national interests and security of...

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such...

We consider an industry with firms that produce a final good emitting pollution to different degree as a side effect. Pollution is regulated by a tradable quota system where some quotas may have been allocated at the outset, i.e. before the quota market is opened. We study how volatility in...

Network externalities could be present for many low or zero emission technologies. One obvious example is alternative fuel cars, whose use value depends on the network of service stations. The literature has only briefy looked at environmentally benefcial technologies. Yet, the general...

We study an international climate agreement that assigns emission quotas to each participating country. Unlike the simplest models in the literature, we assume that abatement costs are affected by R&D activities undertaken in all firms in all countries, i.e. abatement technologies are...

We explore the efficacy of price and quantity controls in a dynamic set up in which the decisions of some agents are irreversible. We demonstrate that the assumption of irreversibility improves the performance of a tax relative that of a system of tradable quotas and significantly alters the...