For years, economists and lawyers have bemoaned the inefficiencies of the current centralized, command-and-control regime of environmental regulation. Despite the manifest failure of the current regime, however, the system of environmental regulation seems to be largely immune to rationalization...

Issues relating to the interaction of trade and the environment are a major international policy concern. They are likely to be a focal point during the next round of trade negotiations within the WTO. Free trade advocates contend that trade liberalization makes countries richer and as a result...

Recent studies find that environmental tax swaps typically exacerbate the costs of the tax system and therefore do not produce a "double dividend". We extend previous models by incorporating tax-favored consumption goods (e.g. housing, medical care). The efficiency gains from recycling...

We study how the opportunity to trade in trash might influence the equilibrium outcome when the tax on the externality is determined by a political economy process. In our model, individuals have heterogeneous preferences for environmental quality, and there is a leakage when funds are...

This survey reviews the empirical literature on the impact of environmental policy instruments on the rate and direction of technological change. The survey is explicitly focused on the empirical identification of the hypothesis to expect a stronger impact from market-based incentives than from...