Commodity price volatility in international markets has been used to justify numerous policy interventions, including the need for buffer stocks and counter-cyclical payments. The common measure of volatility, the standard deviation or coefficient of variation, likely overstates the actual...

Environmental regulators often have imperfect information about regulated firms' abatement costs. In this paper we compare taxes and emissions permits in a dynamic setting in which firms behave strategically. The regulator updates policy over time based upon previous aggregate industry...