China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

The availability of technology plays a major role in the feasibility and costs of climate policy. Nonetheless, technological change is highly uncertain and capital intensive, requiring risky efforts in research and development of clean energy technologies. In this paper, we introduce a two-track...

This paper provides an analysis of the link between the global market for crude oil and oil futures risk premium at the aggregate level. It offers empirical evidence on whether the compensation for risk required by the speculators depends on the type of the structural shock of interest....

Using a unique set of data and exploiting a large-scale natural experiment, we estimate the effect of real-time usage information on residential electricity consumption in Northern Ireland. Starting in April 2002, the utility replaced prepayment meters with “smart” meters that allow the...

In this work, we propose an analysis of the global market for crude oil based on a revised version of the Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model introduced by Kilian and Murphy (2014). On this respect, we replace the global proxy for above-ground crude oil inventories with the oil...

Emissions of greenhouse gases linked with global climate change are affected by diverse aspects of economic activity, including individual consumption, business investment, and government spending. An effective climate policy will have to modify the decision calculus for these activities in the...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid...

The Eastern Mediterranean region is rapidly changing. The turbolent political transition in Egypt after the Arab Spring, the civil war in Syria, the emergence of Turkey as leading regional power, the tensions between Israel and Gaza and the never-ending dispute between Turkey and the Republic of...

This essay provides an overview of the major emissions trading programs of the past thirty years on which significant documentation exists, and draws a number of important lessons for future applications of this environmental policy instrument. References to a larger number of other emissions...

Over the last decade decarbonisation has become a key priority for the EU. However, on the contrary of renewable energy or energy efficiency, the role of gas in this process has never been clearly defined. This uncertainty opens a wide debate on the future role of gas in the EU energy system,...