This paper analyses a set of new scenarios for energy markets in Europe to evaluate the consistency of economic incentives and climate objectives. It focuses in particular on the role of natural gas across a range of climate policy scenarios (including the Copenhagen Pledges and the EU Roadmap)...

There is a large consensus among international institutions and national governments to favor urban-containment policies - the compact city - as a way to improve the ecological performance of the urban system. This approach overlooks a fundamental fact: what matters for the ecological outcome of...

This paper examines future energy and emissions scenarios in China generated by the Integrated Assessment Model WITCH. A Business-as-Usual scenario is compared with five scenarios in which Greenhouse Gases emissions are taxed, at different levels. The elasticity of China’s emissions is...

What should be the West's top priority for climate-change policy? This article is a revised and updated version of my talk to the Potsdam Global Sustainability Symposium (which drafted the Potsdam Declaration presented to the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference in Bali).

This paper sheds light on the role of the impact of taxes on energy production versus tariffs on imported goods for trade, energy demand, and welfare. For this, we develop a structural Eaton-Kortum type general equilibrium model of international trade which includes an energy sector. We estimate...

The paper analyses the problem of optimal taxation in oligopoly when environmental degradation induced by the industry production process feeds back into market demand. The main assumption is that economic agents and the policy-maker care about the environment only because its degradation...

If some, but not all, countries are cooperating to reduce CO2 emissions, it can be argued that: A high carbon tax on carbon-intensive tradable sectors in the cooperating countries will reduce the production of goods from these sectors, and therefore CO2 emissions, in those countries. This will...

Both the mining and the burning of coal is pollutive, so one might expect to observe taxes on coal production and consumption. Yet several countries in Western Europe subsidize coal production, and most East European countries subsidize coal consumption. The first part of this paper shows that...

International markets for tradable emission permits (TEP) co-exist with national energy taxation. A firm trading emission permits in the international market also pays energy taxes in its host country, thus creating an interaction between the international TEP-market and national energy taxes....

This paper studies fiscal federalism when regions differ in voters’ ability to monitor public officials. We develop a model of political agency in which rent-seeking politicians provide public goods to win support from heterogeneously informed voters. In equilibrium, voter information...