The creation of the EU's Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) has turned the right to emit CO2 into a positively priced intermediate good for the affected firms. Firms thus face the decision whether to source compliance with the EU ETS within their boundaries or to acquire it through the permit...

Understanding the distributional impacts of market-based climate policies is crucial to design economically efficient climate change mitigation policies that are socially acceptable and avoid adverse impacts on the poor. Empirical studies that examine the distributional impacts of carbon pricing...

Germany aims to phase out coal to achieve its 2030 climate target, for which a UK-style carbon price floor is considered. But this measure comes with risks related to the uncertainty about what price level is sufficient, and the waterbed effect arising from unilateral policy under the EU-ETS....

In June 2018, an agreement between key EU institutions – the Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council – was reached after a long-lasting discourse over the 2030 EU climate and energy policy package. This paper offers a comprehensive assessment of the EU package, with its...

Carbon leakage is an issue of major interest in both academic and policy debates about the effectiveness of unilateral climate policy addressing global externalities. The debate is particularly salient in Europe, where the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) covers emissions of many traded...

With the new rules of the EU ETS, involving cancellation of allowances, cumulative emissions are no longer fixed but depending on the market outcome. Perino (2018) showed that additional abatement effort can reduce cumulative emissions if it occurs within a few years. This article shows that...

We use perturbation methods to derive a rule for the optimal risk-adjusted social cost of carbon (SCC) that incorporates the effects of uncertainties associated with climate and the economy from a calibrated DSGE model. We allow for different aversions to risk and intertemporal fluctuations,...

We analyze how a country pursuing a unilateral climate policy may contribute to a reduction in global CO2 emissions in a cost-effective way. To do so its system of energy taxes and subsidies must account for leakage of emissions from the domestic to the foreign economy. We focus on leakage...

Policy makers in the EU and elsewhere are concerned that unilateral carbon pricing induces carbon leakage through relocation of emission-intensive and trade-exposed industries to other regions. A common measure to mitigate such leakage is to combine an emission trading system (ETS) with...

The transport sector is the only sector where carbon emissions continue to grow. This has led policy makers to propose ambitious policies to reduce emissions in the car sector, in particular fuel efficiency standards, portfolio mandates for Electric Vehicles and purchase taxes or subsidies. A...