Nearly all discussions about the appropriate consumption discount rate for climate-change policy evaluation assume that a single discount rate concept applies. We argue that two distinct concepts and associated rates apply. We distinguish a social-welfare-equivalent discount rate appropriate for...

Borrowing from the experience of environmental markets, this paper proposes a system of tradable deficit permits as an efficient mechanism for implementing fiscal constraints in the European Monetary Union: having chosen an aggregate target for the Union and an initial distribution of permits,...

This paper considers the question of under what circumstances a new environmental regulation should "phase in" gradually over time, rather than being immediately implemented at full force. The paper focuses particularly on climate policy, though its insights are more general. It shows that while...

This paper employs analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to assess the efficiency impacts of two policies to reduce U.S. carbon emissions -- a carbon tax and a carbon quota -- taking into account the inter- actions between these policies and pre-existing tax distortions in factor...

This paper reviews theoretical and empirical literature on the household distribution of the costs and benefits of pollution control policies, and ways of integrating distributional issues into environmental cost/benefit analysis. Most studies find that policy costs fall disproportionately on...

This paper extends Weitzman's (1974) seminal paper comparing price and quantity instruments for regulation to consider a third option: tradable quantity regulations, such as tradable permits. Contrary to what prior work has suggested, fixed quantities may be more efficient than tradable...

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...

This paper develops an analytical model to quantify the costs and distributional effects of various fiscal options for allocating the (large) rents created under prospective cap-and-trade programs to reduce domestic, energy-related CO2 emissions. The trade-off between cost effectiveness and...

This paper examines the impact of temperature changes on rural-urban migration using a 56km×56km grid cell level dataset covering the whole world at 10-year frequency during the period 1970-2000. We find that rising temperatures reduce rural-urban migration in poor countries and increase such...

In this paper we analyze the effect of immigrants on native jobs in fourteen Western European countries. We test whether the inflow of immigrants in the period 1996-2007 decreased employment rates and/or if it altered the occupational distribution of natives with similar education and age. We...