Some, like the European commission, claim that Europe needs more transmission capacity and interconnectors. This paper studies interconnector investment decisions from the perspective of a social cost benefit analysis (maximising total welfare in a country). For two European decisions to build...

As EPA rolls out controversial regulations on power plant emissions of greenhouse gases, a vocal group of legislators, industry groups, and legal and economic scholars are crying foul, arguing that EPA didn't “follow the rules” when it conducted its cost-benefit analyses of these...

In the current economical and financial crisis, the economic evaluation of transport infrastructure investment projects is of most importance. Given the need of most governments to reduce spending and control the deficit, having tools that facilitate decision-making seems to be a key objective....

This study proposes a consistent definition of natural disaster damage costs, i.e., equivalently, of natural disaster prevention benefits in accordance with general definition of benefits, Willingness to Pay, more concretely, Equivalent Variation, of any policy such as tax reforms,...

We study how the scarcity of non-market goods, such as environmental amenities, affects the economic appraisal of climate policy. To this end, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the change in relative prices of non-market goods in the widespread climate-economy model DICE. We show that DICE...

Climate change not only impacts production and market consumption, but also the relative scarcity of non-market goods, such as environmental amenities. We study fundamental drivers of the resulting relative price changes, their potential magnitude, and their implications for climate policy in...

The European Union's Emissions Trading System is the largest system in the world for trade in greenhouse gases. It used to be a cap-and-trade scheme with a fixed supply of permits. However, a recent reform of the system "punctures the waterbed" by making the supply of permits endogenous. The...

We critically assess an almost universal Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) practice. In addition to the central Net Present Value (NPV), analysts frequently also report multiple additional values in what is commonly referred to as ‘NPV sensitivity analysis’. This practice is generally justified...

This paper discusses intermediate results of an ongoing research project to estimate all external costs from all transport modes in Belgium. It gives estimates of the marginal external costs of air pollution from urban transport. The evaluation of the environmental impacts is based on the...