Major carbon-pricing systems in Europe and North America involve multiple jurisdictions (countries or states). Individual jurisdictions often pursue additional initiatives—such as unilateral carbon price floors, legislation to phase out coal, aviation taxes or support programs for renewable...

While prior literature has identified various effects of environmental policy, this note uses the example of a proposed carbon permit system to illustrate and discuss six different types of distributional effects: (1) higher prices of carbon-intensive products, (2) changes in relative returns to...

Climate policy is complicated by the considerable compounded uncertainties over the costs and benefits of abatement. We don't even know the probability distributions for future temperatures and impacts, making cost-benefit analysis based on expected values challenging to say the least. There are...

A two-region, two-firm model is developed in which firms choose the number and the regional locations of their plants. Both firms pollute and, in this context, market structure is endogenous to environmental policy. There are increasing returns at the plant level, imperfect competition between...

We study the determinants of comparative advantage in polluting industries. We combine data on environmental policy at the country level with data on pollution intensity at the industry level to show that countries with laxer environmental regulation have a comparative advantage in polluting...

We model welfare-maximizing policy in an infinite-horizon setting when the probability of a tipping point, the welfare change due to a tipping point, and knowledge about a tipping point's trigger all depend on the policy path. Analytic results demonstrate how optimal policy depends on the...

Cap and trade programs have considerable heterogeneity in permit validity and compliance timing. For example, permits have different validity across time (e.g., banking, borrowing, and seasons) and space (e.g., zonal restrictions), and compliance timing can be annual, in overlapping cycles, or...

One country that tries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may fear that other countries get a competitive advantage and increase emissions ("leakage"). Estimates from computable general equilibrium (CGE) models such as Elliott et al (2010a,b) indicate that 15% to 25% of abatement might be offset...

By reducing the costs of environmental protection, technological change is important for promoting green growth. This entails both the creation of new technologies and more widespread deployment of existing green technologies. This paper reviews the literature on environmentally friendly...