As an important step towards building a "harmonious society" through "scientific development", China has incorporated for the first time in its five-year economic plan an energy input indicator as a constraint. While it achieved a quadrupling of its GDP while cutting its energy intensity by...

Just prior to the Copenhagen climate summit, China pledged to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 relative to its 2005 levels to help to reach an international climate change agreement at Copenhagen or beyond. This raises the issue of whether such a pledge is ambitious or just represents...

We estimate the relationship between electricity, fuel and carbon prices in Germany, France, the Netherlands, the Nord Pool market and Spain, using one-year futures for base and peak load prices for the years 2009-2012, corresponding to physical settlement during the second market phase of the...

I estimate the level of emissions cost pass-through to hourly wholesale electricity prices in Germany, based on spot market data. I control for contemporaneous shocks to demand and supply by constructing a detailed supply curve for fossil generation, and intersecting it with residual demand for...

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...

In most countries, environmental regulation focuses on local pollution, which causes damages near the emission source, while regulation on global pollutants such as greenhouse gases (GHG) has been slow. Theoretically, local and global pollutants can either be substitutes or complements in...

The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) is an intensity-based system and the second oldest national ETS. It is unique in that it is highly international (with unlimited use of Kyoto allowances) and it incorporates forestry. We provide the first empirical analysis of the determinants of...

I estimate the level of emissions cost pass-through to hourly wholesale electricity prices in Germany, based on spot market data. I control for contemporaneous shocks to demand and supply by constructing a detailed supply curve for fossil generation, and intersecting it with residual demand for...

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,...