China had been singled out by Western politicians and media for dragging its feet on international climate negotiations at Copenhagen, the accusations previously always targeted on the U.S. To put such a criticism into perspective, this paper provides some reflections on China's stance and...

The Chinese central government has approved the seven pilot carbon trading schemes. These seven pilot regions are deliberately selected to be at varying stages of development and are given considerable leeway to design their own schemes. These pilot trading schemes have features in common, but...

Putting a price on carbon is considered a crucial step for China's endeavor of harnessing the market forces to reduce its energy consumption and carbon emissions. Indeed, aligned with China's grand experiment with low-carbon provinces and low-carbon cities in six provinces and thirty-six cities,...

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...

This classroom exercise illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of various regulatory frameworks aimed at internalizing negative externalities from pollution. Specifically, the exercise divides students into three groups - the government regulatory agency and two polluting firms - and allows...

The paper studies the effectiveness of a refunded emission payments (REP) scheme in achieving a specific target path of NOx-emission reductions. A REP scheme levies a charge on emissions and refunds the collected funds back to the emitting firms. REP schemes have been highlighted as a remedy to...

This paper demonstrates that an investment decision such as the acquisition of a new technology that affects a particular asset is associated with the dynamic trading network of this asset. Therefore, the exogenous variables of this trading network can be used to identify the determinant factors...

The possibility of intertemporal banking and borrowing of tradeable permits is often viewed as tilting the various policy debates about optimal pollution control instruments toward favoring such time-flexible quantities. The present paper shows that this view is misleading, at least for the...

Who benefits from market-based environmental policies? To shed light on this question, we investigate the environmental and distributional consequences of regional cap-and-trade programs to mitigate sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from U.S. power plants. Using double and triple differences,...