The starting point of this paper is a climate coalition which seeks to reduce global emissions. It is well known from the literature on (spatial) carbon leakage that the climate effect of unilateral measures may be partly offset by the actions of the free-riders. Furthermore, from the literature...

A decarbonization of the energy sector calls for large new investments in renewable energy production. When choosing the location for increased production capacity, the producer has typically limited incentives to take fully into account the investments costs of the subsequent need for increased...

The clean development mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol may induce technological change in developing countries. As an alternative to the clean development mechanism regime, developing countries may accept a (generous) cap on their own emissions, allow domestic producers to invest in new efficient...

The literature suggests that Russia and Ukraine may become large sellers of greenhouse gas emissions permits under the Kyoto Protocol and might exploit their market power to maximize trading profits. The EU countries taken together will probably be net buyers of permits. For any given global...

A group of small competitive permits traders facing an imperfectly competitive permit market may consider cooperation (merger) to act strategically in the permit market. It is a well-known result in the literature that the horizontal merger of Cournot players may be unprofitable because of the...

The developed countries can meet part of their Kyoto commitments by investing in emission-reducing projects in developing countries (the Clean Development Mechanism, CDM). Since the developing countries have so far not been willing to accept binding emission commitments, the CDM has been the...

The European Union (EU) identified some positive and negative externalities related to energy production and consumption when adopting its Renewable Energy and Climate Change Package. Given these externalities, we derive the optimal combination of policy instruments. Thereafter, we explore the...

Our point of departure is that a group of developed countries invest in the development of greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement technologies both at home and in developing countries. Such investments reduce the cost of future GHG abatement, and influence the future GHG abatement choices of both...

The EU Parliament has agreed on a target of a 20 % share of renewables in the EU's total energy consumption by 2020. To achieve the target, the Council has adopted mandatory differentiated national targets for each of the Member States. In this paper we consider the potential for cost reductions...

We analyze two mechanism designs for refunding emission payments to polluting firms; Output Based (OB) and Expenditure Based (EB) refunding. In both instruments, emissions fees are returned to the polluting industry, possibly making the policy more easily accepted by policymakers than a standard...