This paper tackles the complex issue of how buyers and sellers within a domestic carbon credit system designed to include regenerating indigenous forest would optimally design contracts for trades of the new good, “carbon sink credits”. The paper begins by briefly defining the constraints...

As tradeable permit programmes mature, two inter-related issues are becoming more critical in creating viable responses to a long-term, highly uncertain environmental problem such as climate change. First, we need to update policies in response to new information; and second, we need to design...

Tropical forests are estimated to release approximately 1.7 PgC per year as a result of deforestation. Avoiding tropical deforestation could potentially play a significant role in carbon mitigation over the next 50 years if not longer. Many policymakers and negotiators are skeptical of our...

Carbon sequestration in plantation forests provides the main means by which New Zealand will meet its international climate change obligations in the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2008–2012). However, without active policy, forests are unlikely to contribute as much in...

Policy enabling tropical forests to approach their potential contribution to global-climate-change mitigation requires forecasts of land use and carbon storage on a large scale over long periods. In this paper, we present an integrated modeling methodology that addresses these needs. We model...

An efficient housing market is of critical importance for individual welfare and for a well-functioning economy. We test the efficiency of this market by estimating the factors that determine both the long-run and the dynamic paths of regional house prices. Our tests use a new quarterly regional...

The New Zealand ITQ system is a dynamic institution that has had many refinements since its inception more than 15 years ago. Nonetheless, the basic tenets of the system - setting a total allowable catch and leaving the market to determine the most profitable allocation of fishing effort - have...

This report was prepared for the Centre for Housing Research Aotearoa New Zealand (CHRANZ). The aim of this study is to identify a set of housing research projects addressing two related topics. First, the impact of economic, social and environmental changes on housing in New Zealand's...

New Zealand is unusual in that nearly 60% of local services are funded from property taxes. These are a mixture of land taxes, capital value taxes, annual rental value taxes and uniform general charges. We explore the efficiency and equity of this system at both national and local levels. We...

Hendy and Kerr (2005b) find that an emissions charge on agricultural methane and nitrous oxide of $25 per tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent would be likely to reduce New Zealand’s net land-use related emissions for commitment period one in the order of 3%, with full accounting. The...