The expansion of wind-generation in the United States poses significant challenges to policy-makers, particularly because wind's intermittency and unpredictability can exacerbate problems of congestion on a transmission-constrained grid. Understanding these issues is necessary if optimal...

This paper contributes to the literature on market power in emissions permits markets, modeling an emissions trading scheme in which polluters differ with respect to their marginal abatement costs at the business-as-usual emissions. The polluters play a two-stage static complete information game...

Renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) have become a popular tool for state governments to promote renewable electricity generation and to decrease carbon dioxide emissions within a state or region. Renewable portfolio standards are a policy tool likely to persist for many decades due to the long...

The consequences of environmental and energy policies in the U.S. can be severely constrained by physical limits of the electric power grid. Flows do not follow the shortest path but are distributed over all lines in accordance with the laws of physics, so grid operators must select which...

Firms can sometimes preempt regulation by changing the nature, scale or location of their activities. The objectives of this paper are to model such preemptive behavior and to draw out implications for regulatory design. Applications to New Source Review are emphasized. Regulatory triggers...

This paper evaluates the consequences of renewable energy policies on welfare and energy prices in a world where carbon pricing is imperfect and the regulator seeks to limit emissions to a (cumulative) target. The imperfectness of the carbon price is motivated by political concerns regarding...

We extend the analysis of optimal scale in pollution permit markets by allowing for both market power and private information. We characterize the total costs (abatement costs and damages) under market power and private information and compare them to total costs under competition. It is...

Quantity-based regulation with banking allows regulated firms to shift obligations across time in response to periods of unexpectedly high or low marginal costs. Despite its wide prevalence in existing and proposed emission trading programs, banking has received limited attention in past welfare...

By using a unique cross-sectional dataset of Chinese industrial firms, this paper investigates the external and internal effects of human capital on firms’ environmental performance. The result shows that firms have better environmental compliance because they are ‘pushed’ into compliance...

Jointly with kilowatt-hours (kWh), electric power plants also produce CO2, NOx, and SO2. In this paper, we apply an environmental production model based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) to compare the production of kWh under command-and-control regulation of the undesirable byproduct with...