This policy note investigates whether the current level of public support to environment-friendly technologies is sufficient to allow European countries to respond to the multiple challenges posed by climate change and other environmental concerns. We first lay out the justifications for...

Myriad policy measures aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector, promote generation from renewable sources, and encourage energy conservation. To what extent do innovation and energy efficiency (EE) market failures justify additional interventions when a carbon price is...

Markets for environmental externalities are typically closely related to the markets causing such externalities, whereupon strategic interaction may result. Along these lines, the market for Tradable Green Certificates (TGCs) is strongly interwoven in the electricity market as the producers of...

We formulate a model with black, green and white certificates markets that function in conjunction with an electricity market. The markets function well in the sense that a common equilibrium solution exist, where all targets are satisfied (e.g. share of green electricity and share of energy...

After a boom and bust cycle in the early 2010s, venture capital (VC) investments are, once again, flowing towards green businesses. In this paper, we use Crunchbase data on 150,000 US startups founded between 2000 and 2020 to better understand why VC initially did not prove successful in funding...

Despite ambitious climate goals and already substantial stocks of developed fossil energy reserves, development of new fossil energy reserves continues to be high. This raises concerns, as it reinforces the fossil industry’s opportunities and incentives to continue extraction, and may...

A growing literature points to the effectiveness of leveraging social interactions and nudges to spur adoption of pro-social behaviors. This study investigates a large-scale behavioral intervention designed to actively leverage social learning and peer interactions to encourage adoption of...

Encouraging innovation is an important part of environmental policy. A large literature in environmental economics examines the links between environmental policy and innovation. This paper reviews recent literature on green innovation. I highlight major trends in the literature, including an...

This paper examines the value that can potentially be created by a vertically integrating energy system. Integration entails operational gains that must be traded off against the requisite cost of capacity investments. In the context of our model, the operational gains are subject to inherent...

We investigate how irreversibility in "dirty" and "clean" capital stocks affects optimal climate policy, from both theoretical and numerical perspectives. An increasing carbon tax will reduce investments in assets that pollute, and so reduce emissions in the short term: our "irreversibility...