The Paris Agreement has achieved one of two key necessary conditions for ultimate success – a broad base of participation among the countries of the world. But another key necessary condition has yet to be achieved – adequate collective ambition of the individual nationally determined...

Increased attention by policy makers to the threat of global climate change has brought with it considerable interest in the possibility of encouraging the expansion of forest area as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide. The marginal costs of carbon sequestration or, equivalently, the carbon...

On a topic like the environment, communication among scholars from different disciplines in the natural and social sciences is both important and difficult, but such communication has been far from perfect. Economists themselves may have contributed to some rather fundamental misunderstandings...

We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method fits within the household production framework (Becker 1965), and is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize a freely-available...

Market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies. These combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the...

We investigate a central issue in the climate change debate associated with the Kyoto Protocol: the likely performance of international greenhouse gas trading mechanisms. Virtually all design studies and many projections of the costs of meeting the Kyoto targets have assumed that an...

Urban water pricing provides an opportunity to examine whether consumers react to the shape of supply functions. We carry out an empirical analysis of the influence of price and price structure on residential water demand, using the most price-diverse, detailed, household-level water demand data...

Some eighty years ago, economists first proposed the use of corrective taxes to internalize environmental and other externalities. Fifty years later, the portfolio of potential economic-incentive instruments was expanded to include quantity-based mechanisms--tradable permits. Thus,...

Environmental policies typically combine the identification of a goal with some means to achieve that goal. This chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Environmental Economics focuses exclusively on the second component, the means - the "instruments" - of environmental policy, and considers, in...

We examine what will be required if market-based environmental policy instruments are to become a major force in U.S. environmental policy. We define market-based instruments, and specify five categories: pollution charges; tradable permits; deposit refund systems; reducing market barriers; and...