Tradable black (CO2) and green (renewables) quotas gain in popularity and stringency within climate policies of many OECD countries. The overlapping regulation through both instruments, however, may have important adverse economic implications. Based on stylized theoretical analysis and...

This paper provides an overview of the U.S. experience with market-based instruments with four categories: emission charges, tradeable permit systems,market friction reduction, and government subsidy reduction. Following that, I examine normative lessons that can be learned from these...

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...

Environmental policies typically combine the identification of a goal with some means to achieve that goal. This chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Environmental Economics focuses exclusively on the second component, the means - the "instruments" - of environmental policy, and considers, in...

In the past 15 years, incentive-based environmental policy instruments, such as pollution taxes and tradeable pollution permits, have become an important supplement to tradition command-and-control instruments in Europe and the U.S. This paper proposes a positive theory of environmental...

We study the cost-effectiveness of a transferable emissions permit system (TEPS) vis a vis a system of emissions standards. Our analysis includes along with abatement costs, the costs of enforcing the system to induce compliance. Further, the analysis considers complete and incomplete...

In 2005, an EU-wide emissions trading scheme covering major CO2 producing sites shall come into power. The key objective of the trading scheme is to promote cost-efficiency of carbon reduction within the EU. We identify policy-relevant tradeoffs between overall efficiency, compensation and...

Starting in 2005, the EU will implement a CO2 emissions trading scheme. In this paper we show that the outspoken goals of economic efficiency and free allocation of allowances are incompatible with harmonized allocation rules. In general, the assignment of allowances is endogenous and differs...

Implementation of an EU-wide emissions trading system by means of National Allocation Plans is at the core of European environmental policy agenda. Member States are faced with the problem of allocating their national emission budgets under the EU Burden Sharing Agreement between...

From 1 January 2005 onwards the European Union has launched the first largescale international carbon emissions trading program. As the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) covers only part of domestic carbon emissions, it implies a hybrid environmental regulation scheme: Each EU Member State...