On 3 June 2008, the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee of the European Parliament hosted a half-day workshop entitled: "Effort sharing under the Climate Package - assessing the role of the Clean Development Mechanism". [...] The workshop explored the role of CDM under the...

In January 2008 the European Commission (EC) presented an integrated Climate and Energy package to cut emissions for the 21st Century, including proposals for specific targets on renewable energy (20% by 2020) and greenhouse gas emissions reduction (20% by 2020). The package, amongst others,...

Agriculture contributes significantly to the emissions of greenhouse gases in the EU. By using a farm-type, linear-programming based model of the European agricultural supply, we first assess the initial levels of methane and nitrous oxide emissions at the regional level in the EU. For a range...

Even though deforestation in tropical developing countries releases large quantities of greenhouse gases, the Kyoto Protocol does not include mechanisms for forest conservation. Nevertheless, deforestation and forest degradation has now taken centre-stage as the developed countries, having...

I study several policy instruments for carbon mitigation with a focus on subsidies for renewable energies, emission taxes and emission allowances. In Chapter 1, I analyze the optimal design and the welfare implications of two policies consisting of an emission tax for conventional fossil-fuel...

This paper uses laboratory experiments to test the theoretical observations that both the violations of competitive risk-neutral firms and the marginal effectiveness of increased enforcement across firms are independent of differences in their abatement costs and their initial allocations of...

In this paper we examine the impacts of transaction costs on enforcing a transferable emissions permit system. We derive an enforcement strategy with a self-reporting requirement that achieves complete compliance in a cost-effective manner. In the absence of transaction costs targeted...

This paper examines the effects of risk aversion on compliance choices in markets for pollution control. A firm’s decision to be compliant or not is independent of its manager’s risk preference. However, noncompliant firms with risk averse managers will have lower violations than otherwise...

Since firms in an emissions trading program are linked together through a permit market, so too are their compliance choices. Thus, enforcement strategies for trading programs must account for not only the direct effects of enforcement on compliance and emissions decisions, but also the indirect...