The favored federal policy to address climate change is a domestic cap-and-trade system. However, a vocal minority of political leaders have begun arguing in favor of a carbon tax. Carbon taxes seem particularly attractive both for fiscal reasons and because they provide certainty over the price...

This paper synthesizes the work in a research program focused on the transparency and comparability of mitigation efforts in multilateral climate change policy. We take as our starting point the emerging international architecture, which creates demand for practical mechanisms to compare...

Despite popularity among economists for their efficiency, energy pollution taxes enjoy less political support than standards-based regulation because of common perceptions that they burden the poor relative to the rich. However, the literature on pollution tax incidence and consumption surveys...

Choices in energy regulation, particularly whether and how to price externalities, can have widely different distributional consequences both across and within income groups. Traditional welfare theory focuses largely on effects across income groups; such “vertical equity” concerns can...

This paper provides an exhaustive review of critical issues in the design of climate mitigation policy by pulling together key findings and controversies from diverse literatures on mitigation costs, damage valuation, policy instrument choice, technological innovation, and international climate...

We review the state of knowledge concerning international CO emission transfers associated particularly with trade in energy-intensive goods and concerns about carbon leakage arising from climate policies. The historical increase in aggregate emission transfers from developing to developed...