This paper studies various options to support allowance prices in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), such as adjusting the cap, an auction reserve price, and fixed and variable carbon taxes in addition to EU ETS. We use a dynamic computable general equilibrium model that explicitly allows...

This paper investigates the welfare costs of unilateral versus internationally coordinated emission permit policies in a two-country overlapping generations model with producer carbon emissions. We show that, for a net foreign debtor country, the domestic welfare costs of a unilateral domestic...

We study the effect of climate policy on companies' greenhouse gas emissions using emissions data for the headquarters and subsidiaries of the world's biggest manufacturing, energy, and utility companies. Our results suggest that financial incentives and legal requirements to audit energy use...

Why have policies aimed at reducing the demand for carbon not succeeded in slowing down global carbon extraction and CO2 emissions, and why have carbon prices failed to increase over the last three decades? This comment argues that this is because of the Green Paradox, i.e. – (the anticipation...

This paper provides a quantitative comparison of the main architectures for an agreement on climate policy. Possible successors to the Kyoto protocol are assessed according to four criteria: economic efficiency; environmental effectiveness; distributional implications; and their political...

Why do for-profit firms take voluntary steps to improve the environment? Brand appeal to green consumers or investors, the ability to influence or avoid regulation, or the experience gained for future regulation, have all been suggested as possible reasons. The empirical evidence is decidedly...

The level and distribution of the costs of tradable allowance schemes are important determinants of whether the regulation is ultimately enacted. Theoretical and simulation models have shown that updating allowance allocations based on firm emissions or output can improve the efficiency of the...

This paper explains how, in the context of incomplete coordination among all countries, unilateral policies that might at first sight seem pro-green could actually turn out to harm the global environment. The free-riding motives and the difficulty of reaching an effective international...

We study the incidence of carbon-reduction and green-energy promotion policies in an open fossil-fuel importing general equilibrium economy. The focus is on mixed price-based or quantity-based policies. Instruments directed toward promoting green energy are shown to reduce also carbon emissions...

Using counterfactual microsimulations, Shapley decompositions of time change in inequality and poverty indices make it possible to disentangle and quantify the relative effect of tax-benefit policy changes, compared to all other effects including shifts in the distribution of market income....