Deep decarbonisation requires large-scale irreversible investments throughout the next decade. Policymakers discuss Carbon Contracts for Differences (CCfDs) to incentivise such investments in the industry sector. CCfDs are contracts between a regulator and a firm that pay out the difference...

Under a great variety of legally relevant circumstances, people have to decide whether or not to cooperate, when they face an incentive to defect. The law sometimes provides people with sanctioning mechanisms to enforce pro-social behavior. Experimental evidence on voluntary public good...

In the context of an Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), we study how uncertainty over the policy parameter affects firms' investment in low carbon technologies. We develop a three period sequential model that combines the two sectors regulated by the scheme and encompasses both irreversible and...

We examine an environmental policy which may be revisited by a new administration. We allow for pollution to be persistent over time and for uncertainty in next period's environmental policy. When pollution is non-persistent, we show that regulatory uncertainty is inconsequential for output,...

This study aims at characterizing the optimal regulation of risky activities when risk assessment is subjective as a result of ambiguity on the probability of an accident. The attitudes toward ambiguity held by stakeholders form subjective risk perceptions, which substantially affect the optimal...

Under favorable but reasonable conditions, an imperfectly enforced emissions tax produces the efficient allocation of individual emissions control; aggregate emissions are independent of whether enforcement of the tax is sufficient to induce the full compliance of firms, and differences in...

Conventional wisdom among environmental economists is that the relative slopes of the marginal social benefit and marginal social cost functions determine whether a price-based or quantity-based environmental regulation leads to higher expected social welfare. We revisit the choice between...