Greenhouse gas policies confront the trade-off between the costs of reducing emissions and the benefits of avoided climate change. The risk of uncertain and potentially irreversible catastrophes is an important issue related to the latter, and one that has not yet been well incorporated into...

Recently, several articles rely on marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves to analyze the EU ETS. While the assumptions on MAC curves drive the results, the prevailing literature on the EU ETS does not take the shape of MAC curves into account. This paper discusses the implications of MAC curve...

The latest reform of European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) enables overlapping policies, such as national coal phase-outs, to affect total emissions. For evaluatingoverlapping policies, this paper applies a detailed partial equilibrium model of the EU ETS.Under perfect foresight,...

With the increase of the linear reduction factor (LRF), the implementation of the market stability reserve (MSR) and the introduction of the cancellation mechanism (CM), the EU ETS changed fundamentally. We develop a discrete time model of the intertemporal allowance market that accurately...

In this article, we look at the combination of several market-based climate and energy policies and compare them with first best solution, i.e., a perfectly designed emission tax or emission cap level. It is shown that in the case an emission control policy is imperfect designed or implemented,...

Uncertainty is critical to questions about climate change policy. Recently developed recursive integrated assessment models have become the primary tools for studying and quantifying the policy implications of uncertainty. We decompose the channels through which uncertainty affects policy and...

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it...

We develop a novel theoretical framework for studying ecosystems in which interacting state variables which are affected by management decisions diffuse in space. We identify (i) mechanisms creating spatial patterns when economic agents maximize profit at each site by ignoring the impact of...

The market mechanisms built into the Kyoto Protocol have the potential of significantly reducing the costs of meeting the aggregate emission target. But if trading proceeds on a project-by-project basis rather than on a frictionless market, the total cost saving potential of trading is unclear....

A formula is derived for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that takes account of intragenerational income inequality and its evolution with economic growth. The social discount rate (SDR) should be adjusted to account for intragenerational and intergenerational inequality aversion and for risk...