We examine the optimal management of emission permit markets when banking but not borrowing of permits is allowed. The regulator maximizes expected social welfare through an optimal allocation rule in an infinite horizon setting. The policy is second-best as the emission cap is set before the...

Under which conditions unilateral tightening of climate policy causes a weak or strong green paradox or even decreases social welfare has recently been studied by Hoel (2011). Hoel assumes that the costs of extracting fossil fuel are linear in output. We extend his model by allowing for...

After twenty years of global negotiations, the world is still far from a comprehensive climate agreement. The "top-down" approach embodied by the Kyoto Protocol has all but stalled, chiefly due to disagreements over levels of ambition and objections to financial transfers. To avoid those...

This paper shifts the perspective of the recent green paradox literature towards the demand side. Based on a simple model, I show that a subsidy on input factors in a Cobb-Douglas production function may contribute substantially to postponing resource extraction into the future and, thereby, to...

The economic prescription for climate change is clear: price carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions to internalize climate damages. In practice, a variety of political economy constraints prevent the introduction of a carbon price equal to the full social cost of emissions. This...

This paper provides theoretical and empirical insights on the extent to which the availability of carbon offsetting may substitute the individual use of other carbon-reducing measures. Theoretically, we demonstrate an ambiguous impact of offsetting on the use of other measures and derive...

This paper is, to our knowledge, the first paper in climate economics to consider the combination of spatial heat transport and polar amplification. We simplified the problem by stratifying the Earth into latitude belts and assuming, as in North et al. (1981), that the two hemispheres were...

We incorporate three important aspects of current climate policy, unilateralism, demand side approach and a climate target, in a multi-country model with flow dependent fossil fuel extraction costs and a backstop. It turns out that the optimal climate coalition should encompass all countries...

To mitigate climate change, some governments opt for instruments focused on investment, like performance standards or feebates, instead of carbon prices. We compare these policies in a Ramsey model with clean and polluting capital, irreversible investment and a climate constraint. Alternative...

To decarbonize the power sector policy-makers need to commit to long-term credible rules for climate and energy policy. Otherwise, time-inconsistent policy-making will impair investments into low-carbon technologies. However, the future benefits and costs of decarbonization are subject to...