Cap and trade mechanisms enjoy increasing importance in environmental legislations worldwide. One of the important aspects of designing cap and trade mechanisms is the possibility of authorities to grant emission permits for free. Unlike analyzed in the seminal contributions on cap and trade...

In the standard setting a system of tradable permits is effective and cost-efficient in attaining the policy objective of pollution reduction. This outcome is challenged in case of a tradable permit system in a federal system/constitution with individual states having discretionary power...

Cap and trade mechanisms enjoy increasing importance in environmental legislation worldwide. The most prominent example is probably given by the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) designed to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, several other countries already have or are planning...

Given that the carbon price in the EU Emissions Trading System is only around 5€/tCO2 while consensus about a more stringent EU climate policy is very unlikely in the near future, we explore the potential scope and optimal design of additional national climate policies in the current EU policy...

Climate change economics mostly neglects sizeable interactions of carbon pricing with other fiscal policy instruments. Conversely, public finance typically overlooks the effects of future decarbonization efforts when devising instruments for the major goals of fiscal policy. We argue that such a...

Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

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...

Economic thought on climate policy as an instance of environmental regulation is strongly influenced by the principle of a uniform carbon price. Economists acknowledge that this principle breaks down in a second-best world with other distortions, such as taxes and market power in domestic and...

In the standard setting a system of tradable permits is effective and cost-efficient in attaining the policy objective of pollution reduction. This outcome is challenged in case of a tradable permit system in a federal system/constitution with individual states having discretionary power...

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...