Given the bleak prospects for a global agreement on coordinated policies to mitigate climate change, political pressure is increasing among industrialized countries for unilateral abatement. A major challenge thereby is the appropriate response to the threat of emissions leakage. Border carbon...

The Swiss energy strategy until 2050 envisages ambitious CO2 emission reduction targets along with substantial cutbacks in electricity consumption to establish a low-carbon economy without nuclear energy. Our computable general equilibrium analysis find that compliance with stringent CO2...

We show that imposition of a state-level environmental tax in a federation crowds out preexisting federal taxes. We explain how this vertical fiscal externality can lead unilateral statelevel environmental policy to generate a welfare gain in the implementing state, at the expense of other...

Dividing the burden for greenhouse gas abatement amongst the provinces has proven challenging in Canada, and is a major factor contributing to Canada's poor historic performance on greenhouse gas abatement. As the country aims to achieve substantial cuts to emissions over the next decade and by...

This paper studies whether pro-environmental consumption choices are consistent with utility maximization and what role the consumption behavior of reference persons and one’s own past behavior play in this context. By combining data on individuals’ pro-environmental consumption from a...

Thermoelectric power plants depend on cooling water drawn from water bodies. Low river run-off and/or high water temperatures limit a plant’s production capacity. This problem may intensify with climate change. To what extent do such capacity reductions affect electricity spot markets? Who...

In the absence of effective world-wide cooperation to curb global warming, import tariffs on embodied carbon have been proposed as a potential supplement to unilateral emissions pricing. We consider alternative designs for such tariffs, and analyze their effects on global welfare within a...

Policy advocates frequently request for unilateral action to push forward climate protection in international negotiations. It is yet conventional wisdom in environmental economics that unilateral action does not pay for the first mover due to free-riding behavior of the other countries. How...

This paper analyzes the dynamic behavior of day-ahead spot prices in the German electricity spot market due to positive structural shocks in wind and solar power. It uses a dynamic structural vector autoregressive model to estimate the related structural impulse response functions. The estimates...

Unilateral carbon policies are inefficient due to the fact that they generally involve emission reductions in countries with high marginal abatement costs and because they are subject to carbon leakage. In this paper, we ask whether the use of carbon tariffs—tariffs on the carbon embodied in...