The United States Government recently concluded a year-long process to develop a range of values representing the monetized damages associated with an incremental increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, commonly referred to as the social cost of carbon (SCC). These values are currently used...

Global carbon pricing can yield revenues which are large enough to create significant global pro-poor redistributive opportunities. We analyze alternative multidecade growth trajectories for major global economies with carbon tax rates designed to stabilize emissions in the presence of both...

Public policies for pollution control, including climate change policies, sometimes allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions in that sector with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may often find it more costly to verify offset...

Although international programs for carbon offsets play an important role in current and prospective climate-change policy, they continue to be very controversial. Asymmetric information creates several incentive problems, include adverse selection and moral hazard, in offset markets. The...

This paper develops a simple model of a polluting industry and an innovating firm. The polluting industry is faced with regulation and costly abatement. Regulation may be taxes or marketable permits. The innovating firm invests in R&D and develops technologies which reduce the cost of pollution...

The geographical location of economic activity within the United States has important implications for carbon mitigation. If households clustered in California's cities rather than in more humid southern cities such as Memphis and Houston, then the average household carbon footprint would be...

Human activity has disrupted the natural balance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and is causing climate change. Burning fossil fuels and deforestation result directly in about 9 gigatons of carbon (GtC) emissions per year against the backdrop of the natural carbon flux -- emission and...

Any economic analysis of climate change policy requires some model that describes the impact of warming on future GDP and consumption. Most integrated assessment models (IAMs) relate temperature to the level of real GDP and consumption, but there are theoretical and empirical reasons to expect...

The allocation of emissions allowances is among the most contentious elements of the design of cap-and-trade systems. In this paper we develop a detailed representation of the US western electricity market to assess the potential impacts of various allocation proposals. Several proposals involve...