When choosing his speed, a driver faces a trade-off between private benefits (time savings) and private costs (fuel cost and own damage and injury). Driving faster also has external costs (pollution, adverse health impacts and injury to other drivers). This paper uses large-scale speed limit...

This paper studies how the voluntary standards established by certification programs affect consumer welfare and international trade in an open world economy. I develop a two-country model with differentiated products and imperfectly-informed consumers. Consumers in both countries value the...

In recent years, cases in which state governments chose to override federal environmental regulation with tighter regulations of their own have become increasingly common, even for pollutants that have substantial spillovers across states. This paper argues that this change arose at least in...

Relying on a small natural field experiment conducted by the Norwegian Environmental Protection Agency, I estimate effects of three fundamental elements of most monitoring and enforcement practices: self-reporting, audit frequency and specific deterrence. I find evidence of under-reporting of...

This paper examines the impact of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) on equilibrium emissions, output, price, market concentration, and profits in a generalized Cournot model. We develop formulae for the number of emissions permits that have to be freely allocated to firms to neutralize the...

In an effort to reduce air pollution and congestion, Latin American cities have experimented with different policies to persuade drivers to give up their cars in favor of public transport. This paper looks at two of such policies: the driving restriction program introduced in Mexico City in...

This paper provides a rationale for subsidizing green (renewable) energy production. Within a multi-country model where energy is produced with mobile capital in green and dirty production, we investigate the countries' decentralized choice of emissions taxes and green energy subsidies. Without...

In the basic model of the literature on international environmental agreements (IEAs) (Barrett, 1994; Rubio and Ulph, 2006), the number of signatories of self-enforcing IEAs does not exceed three, if non-positive emissions are ruled out. We extend that model by introducing a composite consumer good...