While environmental taxes aim at making environmentally harmful behaviour more costly, the opposite is true for environmentally beneficial tax incentives. Tax incentives imply foregone public revenues to favour less polluting consumption and investment activities in order to achieve...

Emission leakage could potentially undermine the effectiveness of unilateral climate policies. Significant emission transfers from developing countries to developed countries in the form of emissions embodied in trade have been interpreted as an indication of such leakage. To reduce leakage and...

Many pollution-related industries wield strong political influence and can effectively veto policy initiatives that would harm their profits. A politically realistic approach to environmental policy therefore seems to require the alleviation of significant profitlosses to these industries. The...

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...

This chapter examines government policy alternatives for protecting the environment. We compare environmentally motivated taxes and various non-tax environmental policy instruments in terms of their efficiency and distributional impacts. Much of the analysis is performed in a second-best setting...

This paper studies the effect of climate policy uncertainty on firm polluting behavior. I find that firms reduce toxic emissions and close toxic facilities during the heightened climate policy uncertainty periods. Firms respond to climate policy uncertainty by adopting abatement technology to...