After twenty years of global negotiations, the world is still far from a comprehensive climate agreement. The "top-down" approach embodied by the Kyoto Protocol has all but stalled, chiefly due to disagreements over levels of ambition and objections to financial transfers. To avoid those...

We develop a stochastic model to rank different policies (tax, fixed cap and relative cap) according to their expected total social costs. Three types of uncertainties are taken into account: uncertainty about abatement costs, business-as-usual (BAU) emissions and future economic output (the two...

There is a large consensus that low levels of carbon price cannot provide adequate incentives to invest in cleaner technologies and abate emissions. Since carbon demand and price tend to decrease during recessions, economists and policy makers have proposed different types of price stabilizing...

Strategies of international risk management, as the implementation of tradable emission permits, feed back to the incentive structure of a treaty, like the Kyoto Protocol. Discussing the Kyoto Protocol the question was: Should there be any restrictions on the trading of emission permits or not?...

We explain the spatial concentration of economic activity, in a model of economic geography, when the cost of environmental policy - which is increasing in the concentration of emissions - and an immobile production factor act as centrifugal forces, while positive knowledge spillovers and...

This paper aims at characterizing the conditions of wind power deployment in order to infer a carbon price level that would provide wind power with comparable advantage over fossil fuel technologies as effective wind support policies. The analysis is conducted on Danish data from 2000 to 2010,...

This paper proposes an innovative solution to distribute free allowances to the cement sector under emissions trading systems, called hybrid output-based allocation (OBA). We demonstrate that unlike many of the allocation methods currently being used, our design provides incentives which are...

We analyze the price dynamics of European allowances and international carbon credits in the second phase of the European carbon market. We develop and use a model combining fundamental drivers associated with the demand for quotas by installations and risk-return considerations related to the...

We assess five proposals for the future of the EU greenhouse gas Emission Trading Scheme (ETS): pure grandfathering allocation of emission allowances (GF), output-based allocation (OB), auctioning (AU), auctioning with border adjustments (AU-BA), and finally output-based allocation in sectors...

Most CO2 abatement policies reduce the demand for fossil fuels and therefore their price in international markets. If these policies are not global, this price decrease raises emissions in countries without CO2 abatement policies, generating "carbon leakage". On the other hand, if the countries...