Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the...

The paper deals with the social and economic dimensions of climate change impacts and adaptation in Italy. The ultimate aim of the paper is to provide policy makers and experts with a conceptual framework, as well as methodological and operational tools for dealing with climate change impacts...

This paper studies countries' incentives to develop advanced pollution abatement technology when technology may spillover across countries and pollution abatement is a global public good. We are motivated in part by the problem of global warming: a solution to this involves providing a global...

Despite the growing concern about actual on-going climate change, there is little consensus about the scale and timing of actions needed to stabilise the concentrations of greenhouse gases. Many countries are unwilling to implement effective mitigation strategies, at least in the short-term, and...

The usually assumed two categories of costs involved in climate change policy analysis, namely abatement and damage costs, hide the presence of a third category, namely adaptation costs. This dodges the determination of an appropriate level for them. Including adaptation costs explicitly in the...

The abatement of non-CO2 greenhouse gases (OGHG) has proved to be of paramount importance for reaching global mitigation targets. The modeling of their abatement is normally carried out referring to marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves, which by now represent a standard approach for such an...

Decision makers facing abatement targets need to decide which abatement measures to implement, and in which order. Measure-explicit marginal abatement cost curves depict the cost and abating potential of available mitigation options. Using a simple intertemporal optimization model, we...

This paper investigates the relative economic and environmental outcomes of price versus quantity mechanisms to control GHG emissions when abatement costs are uncertain. In particular, we evaluate the impacts on policy costs, CO2 emissions and energy R&D for a stringent mitigation target of 550...

Climate-economy models aiming at quantifying the costs and effects of climate change impacts and policies have become important tools for climate policy decision-making. Although there are several important dimensions along which models differ, this paper focuses on a key component of climate...

This paper finds that it is optimal to start a long-term emission-reduction strategy with significant short-term abatement investment, even if the optimal carbon price starts low and grows progressively over time. Moreover, optimal marginal abatement investment costs differ across sectors of the...