This paper establishes the importance of emission standards for the decision making during the process of procurement of new public transport buses. Frequent changes in the emission standards add to the uncertainty during the decision making for fleet management. A bus has a life expectancy of...

This paper studies the interaction between the performance of firms and unions and the environmental policy chosen by governments when there is a negative environmental externality from production of a good which only affects the country where the firm is located. I assume that governments...

Decisions concerning environmental protection hinge on estimates of economic burden. Over the past 30 years, economists have developed and applied various tools to measure this burden. In this paper, developed as a chapter for the Handbook of Environmental Economics, we present a taxonomy of...

A number of state public utility commissions are using "social costing" methods to consider externalities in electricity resource planning. The most comprehensive and formal method is the use of monetary place-holders in the financial evaluation of new investments and potentially in system...

The paper develops a framework to evaluate permits granted to firms under the Environmental Protection Agency's Project XL -- with emphasis on the novel air permit granted to the Intel Corporation. We describe the permit, the process that created it, and the types of costs and benefits likely to...

In theory, competitive emission permit markets minimise total abatement cost for any emissionceiling. Permit markets are often imperfectly competitive, however, if they are thin anddominated by large firms. The dominant firm(s) could exercise market power and increase otherfirms’ costs of...

In order to improve public health in areas with air quality problems, the US Clean Air Act imposes a variety of federal regulations on gasoline, which have led to a proliferation of fuel blends known as “boutique fuels.” More than 45 fuel blends are sold nationwide. We examine the effects of...

Conventional wisdom among environmental economists is that the relative slopes of the marginal social benefit and marginal social cost functions determine whether a price-based or quantity-based environmental regulation leads to higher expected social welfare. We revisit the choice between...

In this paper we examine the impacts of transaction costs on enforcing a transferable emissions permit system. We derive an enforcement strategy with a self-reporting requirement that achieves complete compliance in a cost-effective manner. In the absence of transaction costs targeted...

Does environmental regulation impair international competitiveness of pollutionintensive industries to the extent that they relocate to countries with less stringent regulation, turning those countries into“pollution havens”? We test this hypothesis using panel data on outward foreign direct...