Contemporary research shows consumers are willing to pay a premium for eco-friendly products, suggesting eco-labels and other information-based policies may be an alternative to market-based policy tools. Emission taxes and tradable permits incentivize pollution reduction through monetary...

Studies of second-best environmental regulation of identical polluting agents have invariably ignored potentially welfare-improving asymmetric regulation by imposing equal regulatory treatment of identical firms at the outset. Yet, cost asymmetry between oligopoly firms may well give rise to...

Most policies for pricing pollution under asymmetric information proposed in the literature to date are rarely--if ever--used in practice. This is likely due to their complexity. We investigate the scope for using somewhat simpler policies that are more closely related to pricing schemes already...

I study how policymakers can access and act on the information about climate change damages that is dispersed throughout the economy. I analyze a new dynamic deposit-refund instrument (called "carbon shares") that I show can: i) efficiently price emissions conditional on information, ii)...

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