The major greenhouse gases, CO2 and CH4, are uniformly mixing, but spatial inequalities in emissions do matter in terms of both efficiency and equity of environmental policy formation and implementation. As the recent evidence has mainly focused on convergence issues between countries, this...

As a consequence of the missing global agreement in the fight against Climate Change, several independent emissions trading schemes are coming into operation. From an economic perspective it would be desirable if prices of CO2 emission allowances were the same in each scheme, as this would...

Emissions of greenhouse gases linked with global climate change are affected by diverse aspects of economic activity, including individual consumption, business investment, and government spending. An effective climate policy will have to modify the decision calculus for these activities in the...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid...

California will enact an economy wide cap-and-trade program on CO2. Estimates of the value of tradable emissions allowances in the first year range from roughly $2.6 to $7.8 billion, when electricity and industry are covered under the program. Those sectors receive most of their allowances for...

The Great Tōhoku-Earthquake and the following nuclear meltdown in Fukushima called the world's attention to Japans' energy and climate policy. Japan is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouses gases in the world and still far away from reaching its Kyoto target. Emissions trading systems have...

This paper identifies principles for carbon pricing that could attract a broad based and durable societal consensus in Australia. It applies these principles to a phased carbon pricing architecture as put forward by Australia's Multi-Party Committee on Climate Change, namely a government...

This paper examines alternative ways that the value of CO2 emissions allowances created under cap-and-trade policy could be returned to households. One approach (based on principles of economic efficiency) is effectively a "tax shift" that would use revenues from an auction of CO2 emissions...

This paper analyzes the extensive and intensive margins of participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project by the Global 500. Empirical results based on the Double Hurdle model suggest that the existence of a senior manager with direct responsibility for climate change is associated with higher...

In a parsimonious two-sector general equilibrium model, we challenge the widely-held tenet that within a cap-and-trade system renewable energy policies have no effect on carbon emissions. If the cap does not capture all sectors, we demonstrate that variations of a renewable energy subsidy change...