A sufficiently rapidly rising carbon tax may increase near-term emissions compared with the case of no carbon tax. Even so, such a carbon tax path may reduce total costs related to climate change, since the tax may reduce total carbon extraction. A government cannot commit to a speci.c carbon...

The literature on taxation of rents from nonrenewable resources uses different theoretical assumptions and methods and a variety of empirical observations to arrive at widely diverging conclusions. Many studies use models and methods which disregard uncertainty, investigating distortionary...

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...

Several recent articles have analyzed climate policy giving explicit attention to the nonrenewable character of carbon resources. In most of this literature the economy is treated as a single unit, which in the context of climate policy seems reasonable to interpret as the whole world. However,...

We use a two-period model to investigate intertemporal eects of cost reductions in climate change mitigation technologies for the power sector. With imperfect climate policies, cost reductions related to carbon capture and storage (CCS) may be more desirable than comparable cost reductions...

It is a well known result that taking distributional constraints into account when allocating tradable permits to different agents can lead to an imperfectly competitive permit market. Hence, the emission target is no longer met at least cost. In this paper we suggest an allocation rule for...

Fossil fuels are non-renewable carbon resources, and the extraction path of these resources depends both on present and future demand. When this “Hotelling feature”is taken into consideration, the whole price path of carbon fuel will shift downwards as a response to the reduced cost of the...

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...

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...

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...