Many countries have adopted energy policies that promote biofuels as a substitute for gasoline in transportation. For instance, more than 40% of U.S. grain is now used for energy and this share is expected to rise under the current Renewable Fuels Mandate. This paper examines the distributional...

Casual empirical evidence suggests that infrastructure provision is higher in economies that are open to world trade. We develop a model of imperfect competition to show that open economies are likely to provide more infrastructure than closed economies. If infrastructure is financed by taxing a...

In the midwestern United States, ethanol produced from corn is mixed with gasoline to meet clean air standards. Allocating land to produce clean fuel means taking away land from farming. We examine a model in which a scarce fossil fuel (e.g., oil) causes pollution but may be substituted by a...

Environmental agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol aim to stabilize the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, which is mainly caused by the burning of nonrenewable resources such as coal. We characterize the solution to the textbook Hotelling model when there is a ceiling on the stock of...

Nous analysons l’impact de deux politiques américaines sur la production et les échanges d’éthanol (biocarburants de première génération) et d’éthanol ligno-cellulosique (biocarburant de seconde génération) aux Etats-Unis et au Brésil ainsi que sur les émissions directes et...

The purpose of this paper is to show that not taking into account clearing costs does not allow to describe correctly the cultivated land dynamics when food demand would require to devote to agriculture an increasing fraction of available land. We also show that the validity of the conclusions...

Regulation of environmental externalities like global warming from the burning of fossil fuels (e.g., coal and oil) is often done by capping both emission flows and stocks. For example, the European Union and states in the Northeastern United States have introduced caps on flows of carbon...

Nous analysons l’impact de deux politiques américaines sur la production et les échanges d’éthanol (biocarburants de première génération) et d’éthanol ligno-cellulosique (biocarburant de seconde génération) aux Etats-Unis et au Brésil ainsi que sur les émissions directes et...

In this paper, we show that the potential for endogenous technological change in alternative energy sources may alter the behaviour of resource-owning firms. When technological progress in an alternative energy source can occur through learning-by-doing, resource owners face competing incentives...