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...

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...

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...

The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as providing publicly-financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide both insurance and redistribution in varying amounts, depending on the design of the policy. We explore the...

We explore the efficacy of price and quantity controls as environmental policy instruments in a stochastic setting in which agents are risk averse. We demonstrate that the assumption of risk aversion may improve the performance of a tax relative to that of a system of tradable quotas, and that...

During the last couple of decades, there has been a large literature discussing how the properties of emission taxes are affected by the existence of distortionary taxes. Most of this literature ignores distributional aspects of environmental taxes and other types of environmental policy...

If investors fear that future carbon taxes will be lower than currently announced by policy makers, long-run investments in greenhouse gas mitigation may be smaller than desirable. On the other hand, owners of a non-renewable carbon resource that underestimate future carbon taxes will postpone...

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...