To correct market failures due to the presence of negative externalities associated with energy consumption, governments have adopted a variety of policies, including taxes, subsidies, regulations and standards, and information-based policies. For example, labels that clearly convey energy...

Although pension funds have gained importance in the last two decades, their role has not been described in detail by economic models. This paper focusses on the scope of these institutional investors when they are not satisfied with a management team of a company in which the pension fund holds...

We study the optimal control of a pollutant that accumulates with a delay.We find that optimal paths are, in general, non-monotonic and oscillatory, but monotonic if the objective function is additively separable. Hence, using additively separable objective functions as an approximation to a...

For more than forty years analysts have pointed out that society might be too slow in adopting energy efficiency technologies, a phenomenon known as the Energy Efficiency Gap. There are persistent market barriers that impede these efforts. Eliciting these barriers and their heterogeneity is key...

This paper investigates the distributional welfare effects of the recent trade war in the solar manufacturing sector resulting from the U.S. government-initiated trade tariffs against Chinese solar manufacturers. Our structural econometric model incorporates the vertical structure between...

In an OLG model with multiple steady states we analyse the impact of endogenous environmental policies on the relevance of history and expectations for the equilibrium selection. In a polluting regime environmental preferences cause an increasing energy tax which raises the risk that the economy...

The literature on the energy-efficiency gap discusses the status-quo bias as a behavioral anomaly that potentially increases the energy consumption of a household through at least three channels: (1) by making consumers keep their energy-using durables as long as possible, until wearout forces...

This paper analyzes the long-term investment decisions of firms that are regulated by an emissions tax and that perceive a degree of market power in their respective output markets. Firms invest in abatement equipment that is fixed over the medium term (e.g., buying a new generator). This paper...

Policy makers have argued that markets are not pricing climate risk appropriately yet, which may lead to a misallocation of resources and financial instability. Climate riskadjusted refinancing operations (CAROs) conducted by the central bank are one possible instrument to address this issue....

We estimate whether consumers respond to local energy costs when purchasing appliances. Using a dataset from an appliance retailer, we compare demand responsiveness to a measure of energy costs that varies with local energy prices versus purchase prices. We strongly reject that consumers are...