This essay revisits the question of instrument choice for the regulation of externalities in the context of climate change. The central point is that the Pigouvian prescription to equate marginal control costs with the expected marginal benefits of damage reduction should guide the design of...

Emissions of greenhouse gases linked with global climate change are affected by diverse aspects of economic activity, including individual consumption, business investment, and government spending. An effective climate policy will have to modify the decision calculus for these activities in the...

Understanding the distributional impacts of market-based climate policies is crucial to design economically efficient climate change mitigation policies that are socially acceptable and avoid adverse impacts on the poor. Empirical studies that examine the distributional impacts of carbon pricing...

To mitigate climate change, some governments opt for instruments focused on investment, like performance standards or feebates, instead of carbon prices. We compare these policies in a Ramsey model with clean and polluting capital, irreversible investment and a climate constraint. Alternative...

This paper finds that it is optimal to start a long-term emission-reduction strategy with significant short-term abatement investment, even if the optimal carbon price starts low and grows progressively over time. Moreover, optimal marginal abatement investment costs differ across sectors of the...

The present paper analyzes the impact of a climate coalition's border carbon adjustment on emissions from commodity production, welfare and the coalition size. The coalition implements border carbon adjustment to reduce carbon leakage and to improve its terms of trade, while the fringe abstains...

There has been intense focus on the issue of how emissions allowances might be allocated under a potential federal cap-and-trade program. What fraction of the allowances should be auctioned out, as opposed to given out free? How much free allocation would be sufficient to preserve profits in...

While environmental taxes aim at making environmentally harmful behaviour more costly, the opposite is true for environmentally beneficial tax incentives. Tax incentives imply foregone public revenues to favour less polluting consumption and investment activities in order to achieve...

This paper highlights the importance of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies for climate policy. We first describe their role in iconic transformation pathways and discuss removal costs and storage duration of different technologies. Based on economic principles, we characterize optimal...

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in policies that target climate change. This paper begins by discussing why policymakers, and central banks in particular, should be concerned about climate change, and goes on to argue why carbon pricing is an appropriate political instrument to...