Border Carbon Adjustment Mechanisms (BCAMs) are becoming reality in the EU and elsewhere, and recur—in very different form—in U.S. legislative proposals. But they remain contentious, with features and differences that leave the underlying welfare rationale and implications unclear. Exploring...

We employ the footloose capital model to examine and compare how two countries decide on their emission permits non-cooperatively under domestic and international emissions trading in the presence of capital mobility. We find that even if two countries are symmetric and have the same carbon...

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...

This paper examines the relative merits of two dominant economic instruments for reducing pollution-'green' taxes and tradable permits. Theoretically, the two instruments share many similarities, and on balance, neither seems preferable to the other. In practice, however, most countries have...

Judged by the principle of intertemporal Pareto optimality, insecure property rights and the greenhouse effect both imply overly rapid extraction of fossil carbon resources. A gradual expansion of demand-reducing public policies - such as increasing ad-valorem taxes on carbon consumption or...

Environmental policies typically combine the identification of a goal with some means to achieve that goal. This chapter focuses exclusively on the second component, the means – the “instruments” – of environmental policy, and considers, in particular, experience around the world with...

Major carbon-pricing systems in Europe and North America involve multiple countries or states. Individual jurisdictions often pursue additional initiatives---such as unilateral carbon price floors, legislation to phase out coal, aviation taxes or support programs for renewable energy---that...

The 1990s produced a large literature on foreign trade and the environment, including both theoretical and empirical contributions. The paper surveys this literature. It starts by looking at the traditional Heckscher–Ohlin type models of international trade and then moves to noncompetitive...

Neither income, consumption, nor wealth is an "ideal" tax base, or one that plausibly identifies what one really should want to tax. Rather, they are best justified as imperfect stand-ins for some underlying (but unobservable) metric of inequality that may be relevant to distributive justice...

The complexity of integrated assessment models (IAMs) prevents the direct appreciation of the impact of uncertainty on the model predictions. However, for a full understanding and corroboration of model results, analysts might be willing, and ought to identify the model inputs that influence the...