In many developing countries, a host of financial, institutional, and political factors hamstring conventional environmental regulation. Given these constraints, a promising strategy for controlling pollution is to promote the voluntary adoption of clean technologies. Although this strategy has...

This paper provides new evidence on the role of non-market based ("command-and-control") regulations in relation to innovations in environmental technologies. While pricing is generally considered the first-best policy instrument, non-market regulations, such as technology standards and...

This study looks at the effects of the choice between taxes and permits on the pattern of adoption of a new (pollution) emissions abatement technology. It uses a dynamic setting, where the regulator observes the arrival and initial use of the technology and determines the optimal ex-post amount...

There are many situations where environmental authorities use a mix of environmental policy instruments, rather than one single instrument, to address environmental concerns. For example, one instrument may be used to reduce overall emissions of a pollutant while another is used to address...

In this paper we study the process of technical change in the case of pollution abatement from large stationary sources that have been regulated by a very forceful refunded emission payment policy. Thanks to the high costs of emitting nitrogen oxides (NOx), considerable progress has been made in...

Vintage-differentiated regulations (VDRs) are standards that are fixed with respect to the date of entry of regulated units, with later vintages facing more stringent standards. VDRs play prominent roles under major Federal, state, and local environmental laws. This paper synthesizes what is...

The shale gas revolution in the United States has dropped the price of natural gas (NG) significantly. Combined with new fuel and vehicle technologies, an opportunity exists to expand the use of NG throughout the economy, including in the light-duty fleet of cars and trucks. This expansion could...

Total pollution emitted by U.S. manufacturers declined over the past 30 years, even though manufacturing output increased. This improvement must result from one of two trends: (1) changes in production or abatement processes (“technology”); or (2) changes in the mix of goods manufactured in...

In the longer run, effects on R&D and the implementation of advanced abatement technology may be at least as important as short-run cost effectiveness when we evaluate public environmental policy. In this paper, we show that the number of firms that adopt advanced abatement technology could be...

This paper shows that tradable emissions permits and an emissions tax have a risk-related technology choice effect. We first examine the first- and second-order moments in the probability distributions of optimal abatement and production under the two instruments. The two instruments will, in...