Uncertainty about compliance costs causes otherwise equivalent price and quantity controls to behave differently. Price controls in the form of taxes fix the marginal cost of compliance and lead to uncertain levels of compliance. Meanwhile quantity controls in the form of tradable permits or...

The possibility that workers could be adversely affected by environmental policies imposed on heavily regulated industries has led to claims of a "jobs versus the environment" trade-off by both business and labor leaders. The present research examines this claim at the industry level for four...

This paper presents an analytical and numerical comparison of the welfare impacts of alternative instruments for environmental protection in the presence of endogenous technological innovation. We analyze emissions taxes and both auctioned and free (grandfathered) emissions permits. We find that...

Improved technology is often cited as a means to alter the otherwise difficult trade-off between the economic burden of regulation and environmental damage. Focusing on energy-saving technologies that mitigate the threat of climate change, we find that both energy prices and financial health...

In this study we use datasets from the 1995 and 2000 Community Water Supply surveys to examine the production costs of water supply systems. We first estimate the economies of scale in water supply by estimating the total unit cost as well as individual component cost elasticities. For total...

Economic analyses of climate change policies frequently focus on reductions of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions via market-based, economywide policies. The current course of environment and energy policy debate in the United States, however, suggests an alternative outcome: inefficiently...

Resources for the Future and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (Japan) convened a one-and-one-half day workshop on domestic and international climate policy on February 12–13, 2004 in Washington, D.C. On the first day, 55 participants heard presentations from 14 speakers and...

Most studies that compare price and quantity controls for greenhouse gas emissions under uncertainty find that price mechanisms perform substantially better. In these studies, the benefits from reducing emissions are proportional to the level of reductions, and such linear benefits strongly...

The political economy of environmental policy favors the use of quantity-based instruments over price-based instruments (e.g., tradable permits over green taxes), at least in the United States. With cost uncertainty, however, there are clear efficiency advantages to prices in many cases,...