This paper compares emissions trading based on a cap on total emissions (permit trading)and on relative standards per unit of output (credit trading). Two types of market structureare considered: perfect competition and Cournot oligopoly. The effect of combining the twoschemes is also...

Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

What is the impact of joining the European Union on a small, less developed economy? This is the generalquestion driving this research paper. In particular, the role of factor movements in explaining real wagebehavior in Portugal after its entry in the European Union (EU) is quantitatively...

This study investigates the dynamic efficiency of an emissionregulation regime where companies competitively pay for emissionlicences. We embed the emission licence market in a Cournotmodel where the price of emission licences is subject to strategictradeoff between licences and abatement...

In this paper we study the short term price behavior of December 2008 future prices for EU emissionallowances. We model returns and volatility dynamics of this price showing that a standard ARMA-GARCHframework is not adequate and that the gaussianity assumption is rejected due to the occurrence...

This paper analyzes the eects of the New Source Review (NSR) environmental regula-tions on coal-red electric power plants. Regulations that grew out of the Clean Air Actof 1970 required new electric generating plants to install costly pollution control equipmentbut exempted existing plants....

To assess the impact of tax-benefit policy changes on income distribution over time, wesuggest a methodology based on counterfactual simulations. We start by decomposingchanges in inequality/poverty indices into three contributions: reforms of the tax-benefitstructure (rules, rates, etc.),...

We build a theoretical model to study whether a minimum wage can be welfare-improving if itis implemented in conjunction with an optimized nonlinear income tax. We consider this issuein a framework where search frictions on the labor market generate unemployment. Workersdiffer in productivity...

Auf Grund des internationalen Wettbewerbsdrucks vereinbarten CDU, CSU und SPD in ihrem Koalitionsvertrag vom 11.11.2005 eine grundlegende Reform der Unternehmensbesteuerung. Rund 2 Jahre später stimmte der Bundesrat am 06.07.2007 dem Unternehmensteuerreformgesetz 2008 zu. Diese Reformvollzieht,...

Environmental policy often has to be devised under informational constraints,like uncertainty and asymmetric information. We consider an environmentalpolicy that aims at reducing the welfare losses caused by asymmetricinformation while being sufficiently simple for implementation. Inthis policy,...