This paper examines the operation of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in a Cournot oligopoly.  We study the impact of the ETS on industry output, price, costs, emissions, and profits.  In particular, we develop formulae for the number of emissions permits that have to be freely allocated to...

Carbon leakage is a major concern for policymakers involved with environmental initiatives such as the European Union's emissions trading scheme and similar cap-and-trade proposals in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere.  This paper provides a framework for understanding the drives...

This paper examines the amount of grandfathering needed for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to have a neutral impact on firm profits. We provide a simple formula to calculate profit-neutral grandfathering in a Cournot model with firms of different sizes and a general demand function. Using...

What is the optimal instrument design and choice for a regular attempting to control emissions by private agents in face of uncertainty arising from business cycles?  In applying Weitzman's result [Prices vs. quantities, Review of Economic Studies, 41 (1974), 477-491] to the problem of...

This paper is empirical study, using new experimental data, of repeated game strategies in trust games; its goal is to identify strategies that people use in repeated games. We develop a strategy inference method that maps observed actions to a set of best fitting unobserved repeated game...

It is commonly asserted that such problems as inner-city traffic congestion and pollution can be understood as examples of the Prisoner`s Dilemma Game (PD), but there is a dearth of empirical research that tests this assertion. 587 car owners in Oxford City were presented with three pairs of...

Following the transposition of the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive into Irish law, all properties offered for sale or to let in Ireland are obliged to have an energy efficiency rating.  This paper analyses the effect of energy efficiency ratings on the sale and rental prices of...

The literature on carbon leakage has not yet benefitted from many of the insights of the ‘New Economic Geography’ (NEG).  Most studies assume both an absence of agglomeration forces and that factors do not move inter-regionally.  This paper develops a 2-region NEG model with...

Regular use of effective health-products such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITN) by a household benefits its neighbors by (a) reducing chances of infection and (b) raising awareness about product-effectiveness, thereby increasing product-use.  Due to their potential social benefits and...

Trade unions have been successful in compressing the wage distribution but not in influencing the share of national income going to labour. This paper claims that a compressed wage distribution provides insurance in the same way that the tax and benefit system does and thus may be...