Strategic market behavior by permit sellers will harm the European Union as the EU as a whole is expected to become a large net buyer of permits in a follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. In this paper we explore how the EU could benefit from making permit trade agreements with non-EU...

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...

High transaction costs and thin participation plague water quality trading and prevent markets from delivering expected efficiency gains. Point sources generate a single pollutant, while nonpoint sources generate multiple, complementary pollutants. We develop a dynamic search model of...

Unilateral climate policy induces carbon leakage through the relocation of emission-intensive and trade-exposed industries to regions with no or more lenient emission regulation. Both analytical and numerical studies suggest that emission pricing combined with border carbon adjustments may be a...

We present a two-good, two-country overlapping generations model where emissions arise from production and each country has a domestic emission permit system. When one country unilaterally reduces her cap on emissions, her output available for domestic and foreign consumption diminishes more...

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...

In a group of countries like the European Union all countries seek to achieve their national CO2 emissions target by a joint emissions trading scheme covering some part of their economies (trading sector) and by a national emissions tax in the rest of their economies (nontrading sector)....

Cumulative emissions drive peak global warming and determine the safe carbon budget compatible with staying below 2oC or 1.5oC. The safe carbon budget is lower if uncertainty about the transient climate response is high and risk tolerance low. Together with energy costs this budget determines...

Climate mitigation policy should be imposed over a long period, and spur development of new technologies in order to make stabilization of green house gas concentrations economically feasible. The government may announce current and future policy packages that stimulate current R&D in...

The paper analyses theoretically what role fiscal councils could play and surveys empirically the activities of existing councils. Case studies of the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council and the UK Office for Budget Responsibility are done. It is concluded that fiscal councils should be advisory,...