This essay revisits the question of instrument choice for the regulation of externalities in the context of climate change. The central point is that the Pigouvian prescription to equate marginal control costs with the expected marginal benefits of damage reduction should guide the design of...

It appears inevitable, absent legislative intervention, that regulation under the Clean Air Act (CAA) will move beyond mobile sources to the industrial and power facilities that emit most U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We analyze the mechanisms available to the EPA for regulating such...

The development of climate policy in the United States mirrors international developments, with efforts to initiate a coordinated approach giving way to jurisdictions separately taking actions. The centerpiece of US policy is regulation in the electricity sector that identifies a carbon...

Whether or not the federal government should price carbon continues to be debated. There were several scholarly pieces examining the relative advantages and disadvantages of cap and trade v. a carbon tax at the time of Congressional Debate on the American Clean Energy and Security Act in 2010....

The inclusion of emissions trading in the Kyoto Protocol reflects an important decision to address climate change issues through flexible market mechanisms. In this paper, we address a number of policy issues that must be considered in designing and implementing an international greenhouse gas...

The German Environmental Liability Law (ELL) of 1991 has introduced far-reaching civil liability for environmental damages with the aim to increase firms? efforts to prevent accidents. Previous studies find poor evidence that this goal has actually been achieved. One and a half decades after the...

The German Environmental Liability Law (ELL) of 1991 has introduced far-reaching civil liability for environmental damages with the aim to increase firms? efforts to prevent accidents. Previous studies find poor evidence that this goal has actually been achieved. One and a half decades after the...

For the last four decades, benefit-cost analysis has been a mainstay of the U.S. federal regulatory process and, under Executive Orders in effect since 1981, such analysis must generally be used to justify significant federal regulations. While administrations of different parties have...

This paper assesses the impact of environmental regulation stringency on the relocation of pollution-intensive firms in China. Pollution haven hypothesis (Porter theory) suggests that firms would (not) choose to relocate (but to innovate). We proxy the regulation stringency with multidimensional...

Environmental economics has employed the seminal contribution of Ronald H. Coase (1960) intensively but has remained relatively unaffected by the contributions of perhaps his most influential follower, Oliver E. Williamson. As an initial step in addressing this oversight, we apply the analytical...