Title IV of the 1990 US Clean Air Act Amendments established a market for transferable sulfur dioxide emission allowances among electric utilities. The market offers firms facing high marginal costs for pollution abatement the opportunity to purchase the right to emit sulfur dioxide from firms...

Without continuous monitoring of emissions, a pollution control agency needs to evaluate abatement options itself. Apart from making activities cleaner, it should also stimulate reductions in the level of activity in polluting sectors. The author develops an analytical framework to show that a...

Air pollution constitutes an ominous threat to human health and welfare. Its adverse effects are pervasive and may be disaggregated at three levels: (a) local, confined to urban and industrial centers; (b) regional, pertaining to transboundary transport of pollutants; and (c) global, related to...

Increasing demand for clean energy sources is expanding investment in natural gas infrastructure around the world. Many international projects involve pipelines connecting energy markets in two or more countries. A key feature of investment taking place in Latin America is the convergence of gas...

India and China contain about 40 percent of the earth's people. They are at an early stage of economic development, and their increasingly massive energy requirements will depend heavily on coal, a potent source of carbon dioxide, a powerful and long-lasting greenhouse gas. India also has...

Sound public policy addresses externalities directly, when possible. Air pollution is best alleviated by policy instruments that internalize the social cost of pollution, making it attractive to reduce emissions. One such instrument might be a tax levied on individual emissions, if they are...

In a one-period model, whether or not individual weights in the welfare function are based on initial endowments dictate who provides public goods. But with long-term public goods, banning wealth redistribution still allows for several equilibriums depending on Parties'willingness to acknowledge...

The author brings together two of government's primary challenges: environmental protection, and taxation to generate revenues. If negative externalities can be reduced not only by changes in consumption patterns, but also by making each activity cleaner (abatement efforts), how shall...

Struck by the fact that economists did not have a plausible model for why emissions standards, and mandated technologies, play a dominant role in pollution control, the author sought answers to two questions: 1) Should one stimulate emissions reductions by firms, and households, rich and poor,...