Australia managed to pass a national carbon pricing scheme into legislation in November 2011, which has come into effect from July 2012. The scheme includes elements of a CO2-equivalent tax as a short prelude to emission trading. Several fundamental problems remain unaddressed, including: the...

In this paper we advocate a new initial allocation mechanism for a tradable pollution permit market. We outline a Permit Allocation Contest (PAC) that distributes permits to firms based on their rank relative to other firms. This ranking is achieved by ordering firms based on an observable...