The political economy of environmental policy favors the use of quantity-based instruments over price-based instruments (e.g., tradable permits over green taxes), at least in the United States. With cost uncertainty, however, there are clear efficiency advantages to prices in cases where the...

Most studies that compare price and quantity controls for greenhouse gas emissions under uncertainty find that price mechanisms perform substantially better. In these studies, the benefits from reducing emissions are proportional to the level of reductions, and such linear benefits strongly...

Because conventional command-and-control environmental regulation often performs poorly in developing countries, policymakers are increasingly experimenting with alternatives, including voluntary regulatory programs. Research in industrialized countries suggests that such programs are sometimes...

The pollution haven hypothesis suggests that unilateral domestic emission mitigation policies could cause adverse “competitiveness†impacts on domestic manufacturers as they lose market share to foreign competitors and relocate production activity – and emissions – to...