Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO₂ cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies: First, by creating this system to reduce SO₂ emissions to curb acid...

Vintage-differentiated regulation (VDR) is a common feature of many environmental and other regulatory policies, wherein standards for regulated units are fixed in terms of the units' respective dates of entry, with later entrants facing more stringent regulation. In the most common application,...

Vintage-differentiated regulations (VDRs) are standards that are fixed with respect to the date of entry of regulated units, with later vintages facing more stringent standards. VDRs play prominent roles under major Federal, state, and local environmental laws. This paper synthesizes what is...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid...

Negotiations pursuant to the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action appear likely to lead to a 2015 Paris agreement that embodies a hybrid climate policy architecture, combining top-down elements, such as for monitoring, reporting, and verification, with bottom-up elements, including nationally...

The problem of the commons is more important to our lives and thus more central to economics than a century ago when Katharine Coman led off the first issue of the American Economic Review. As the U.S. and other economies have grown, the carrying-capacity of the planet - in regard to natural...

We describe three essential elements of an effective post-2012 international global climate policy architecture: a means to ensure that key industrialized and developing nations are involved in differentiated but meaningful ways; an emphasis on an extended time path of targets; and inclusion of...

We examine an implication of the 'Coase Theorem' which has had an important impact both on environmental economics and on public policy in the environmental domain. Under certain conditions, the market equilibrium in a cap-and-trade system will be cost-effective and independent of the initial...

There is growing impetus for a domestic U.S. climate policy that can provide meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. I describe and analyze an up- stream, economy-wide CO2 cap-and-trade system which implements a gradual trajectory of emissions reductions (with...