In 2005, an EU-wide emissions trading scheme covering major CO2 producing sites shall come into power. The key objective of the trading scheme is to promote cost-efficiency of carbon reduction within the EU. We identify policy-relevant tradeoffs between overall efficiency, compensation and...

Germany taxes electricity use since 1999. The government granted reduced rates to energy intensive firms in the industrial sector for addressing potentially adverse effects on firms' competitiveness. Firms that use more electricity than certain thresholds established by legislation, pay reduced...

Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

In 2005, an EU-wide emissions trading scheme covering major CO2 producing sites shall come into power. The key objective of the trading scheme is to promote cost-efficiency of carbon reduction within the EU. We identify policy-relevant tradeoffs between overall efficiency, compensation and...

Germany taxes electricity use since 1999. The government granted reduced rates to energy intensive firms in the industrial sector for addressing potentially adverse effects on firms' competitiveness. Firms that use more electricity than certain thresholds established by legislation, pay reduced...

Understanding who benefits from fuel price subsidies and the welfare impact of increasing fuel prices is key to designing, and gaining public support for, subsidy reform. This paper updates evidence for developing countries on the magnitude of the welfare impact of subsidy reform and its...

What is a feasible and efficient policy to regulate air pollution from vehicles? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead rely on exhaust standards that limit air pollution emissions per mile for new vehicles. We assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these...

We study the spatial misallocation resulting from subsidies for residential solar panels in the US and quantify the associated environmental costs. We build a structural model of solar panel demand and electricity production across the country and estimate the model by combining 1) remotely...

The study evaluates the efficiency of government intervention using a vertical structured model including imperfectly competitive agricultural input markets, the bread grain market, and the imperfectly competitive food industry. To test for policy efficiency the actually observed bread grain...

Although gasoline taxes are widely used (nearly) efficient CO2 emission controls, additional fuel-efficiency regulation is applied e.g. in the USA and in Europe. In a simple analytical model, we specify the welfare implications of (i) gasoline taxes, (ii) of 'gas-guzzler taxes' (iii) of...