By granting discounts on environmental taxes to heavy polluting firms, the government is missing out on significant tax revenues and achieving considerably less in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That is the central conclusion of research by Ralf Martin and colleagues, which reveals the...

When industry compensation is offered to prevent relocation of regulated firms, efficiency requires that payments be distributed across firms so as to equalize marginal relocation probabilities, weighted by the damage caused by relocation. We formalize this fundamental economic logic and apply...

The EU Emissions Trading Scheme continues to exempt industries deemed at risk of carbon leakage from permit auctions. Carbon leakage risk is established based on the carbon intensity and trade exposure of each 4-digit industry. Using a novel measure of carbon leakage risk obtained in interviews...

The combination of emissions trading and emissions taxes is usually rejected as redundant or inefficient. This conclusion is based on the restrictive assumption that both policies are exclusively meant to control pollution. However, particularly taxes may pursue a variety of other policy...

This paper takes its departure in two observations from the EU’s climate policy. First, the EU has adopted a dual approach with a trading scheme covering CO2 emissions from the energy intensive industry, while the remaining emitters are subject to emission taxes. Second, the targets are...

This paper examines the optimal instrument choice to control emissions under uncertainty. A hybrid regulation mechanism is developed that contains cap-and-trade, emissions taxes and socalled safety valves as special cases. This makes it possible to examine optimal policy choice and the resulting...

There is an increasing demand for putting a shadow price on the environment to guide public policy and incentivise private behaviour. In practice, setting that price can be extremely difficult as uncertainties abound. There is often uncertainty not just about individual parameters but about the...

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...

This is an invited discussion on the Morozova and Stuart’s paper “The Size of the Carbon Market Study”. It suggests a number of issues for consideration in appropriately estimating the size of carbon markets. They include Annex 1 (industrialised) countries’ baseline emissions;...

We compare two tradable permit markets in their ability to meet a safety first environmental target at least cost when some polluters have stochastic, correlated, and non-measurable emissions. In both markets, the point source permit defines the allowable level of the observed (deterministic)...