Policies on climate change that encourage 'clean innovation' while displacing 'dirty innovation' could have a positive impact on short-term economic growth while avoiding the potentially disastrous reduction in GDP that could result from climate change over the longer term.

Putting a price on carbon is critical for climate change policy. Increasingly, policymakers combine multiple policy tools to achieve this, for example by complementing cap-and-trade schemes with a carbon tax, or with a feed-in tariff. Often, the motivation for doing so is to limit undesirable...

This article analyses the debate associated with the co-impacts of climate change mitigation in developing countries, with a particular focus upon Africa’s least developed countries. While these countries’ emissions of greenhouse gases are relatively small (and they do not have emission...

This paper presents the first empirical analysis of programmes to fast-track ‘green’ patent applications in place in seven Intellectual Property offices around the world. We find that only a small share of green patent applications (between 1% and 20% depending on the patent office) request...

This article uses the European Patent Office Worldwide Patent Statistical Database to examine the geographic distribution and global diffusion of inventions in thirteen climate-mitigation technologies since 1978. The data suggest that until 1990 innovation was driven mostly by energy prices....

There is an increasing demand for putting a shadow price on the environment to guide public policy and incentivise private behaviour. In practice, setting that price can be extremely difficult as uncertainties abound. There is often uncertainty not just about individual parameters but about the...

Using administrative employer-employee data from Germany, I exploit two reductions of tax breaks for commuting in 2003/4 and 2006/7 to estimate commuting costs’ effect on the decision to switch job and move house. Standard theory predicts that higher commuting costs should lead to increased...

The allocation rules for phase one EU ETS emissions permits demonstrates that energy generators were lobbying winners because they successfully blocked differential treatment (rules) from energy intensive industries, who cannot pass-on real or nominal costs of permits to consumers. As a result,...

The lowering of trade barriers under the successive reforms of the pillar I of the Common Agricultural Policy, the opening of the commodity markets to an ever greater number of financial actors and the uncertainty created by climate change, amplify both production risk and market risks for...

This paper considers how environmental policies should respond to macroeconomic downturns. It first explores the implications of the global economic downturn of 2008-09 for environmental policies, focusing in particular on the example of action against climate change. The arguments for and...