This paper analyzes hybrid emissions trading systems (ETS) under partitioned environmental regulation when firms’ abatement costs and future emissions are uncertain. We show that hybrid policies that introduce bounds on the price or the quantity of abatement provide a way to hedge against...

Industrialists often claim that, by rendering firms unprofitable and hence forcing them out of business, stricter emissions standards reduce the industry output and competition. This paper considers situations where firms' pollution reduction increases the industry demand, but because of...

There is a tendency among policy-makers and industry lobbyists toward "specific", "relative" or "output-based" quotas, i.e., freely distributed to firms proportionally to their output. With a stochastic analytical model, we demonstrate that relative quotas are dominated either by absolute quotas...

Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the...

Most real world emission permit schemes are in effect hybrid instruments that feature both quantity and price controls. While the effects of price bounds are well understood for issues such as uncertain abatement costs it has not been investigated how such bounds affect time-consistency of...

Grandfathering of emission permits creates a rent to incumbent firms since a valuable asset is freely distributed to them. In this paper, we examine the strategic behaviour of polluters that anticipate a change in environmental regulation from a standard-setting to tradable emission permits with...

Recently, the conventional view that stricter environmental regulations at home will affect the international competitiveness of the domestic firms negatively, has been challenged under the conditions that the regulated firms engage in innovation and that the environmental regulation is...

Project-based emissions trading schemes, like the Clean Development Mechanism, are particularly prone to problems of asymmetric information between project parties and the regulator. In this paper, we extend the general framework on incomplete enforcement of policy instruments to reflect the...