Germany has committed itself to reducing its carbon emissions by 25 percent in 2005 as compared to 1990 emission levels. To achieve this goal, the government has recently launched an environmental tax reform which entails a continuous increase in energy taxes in conjunction with a...

The economic effects of environmental taxes depend on the market structure. Under imperfect competition with free entry and exit, environmental taxes have an impact on economies of scale by changing the number and size of firms. Whether economies of scale rise or fall in a particular industry...

This paper investigates the implications of U.S. withdrawal on environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency, and the distribution of compliance costs taking into account market power of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) on emission permit markets. While exercise of market power on behalf of FSU...

The allocation of emissions entitlements across countries is the single most controversial issue in international climate policy. Extreme positions within the policy debate range from entitlement based on current emission patterns (CEP) to equal-per-capita (EPC) allocations.Convergence (COV)...

This paper introduces a solution for the fair division of common property resources in production economies with multiple inputs and outputs. It is derived from complementing the Walrasian solution by welfare bounds, whose ethical justification rests on commonality of ownership. We then apply...

This paper investigates the economic impacts of two policy proposals: "Strom ohne Atom" (SOA) and "Moratorium Plus" (MOP), both of which contain a premature phase-out of nuclear power in Switzerland. While MOP restricts business-as-usual operation time of existing nuclear power plants to 40...

International climate policy has assigned the leading role in emissions abatement to the industrialized countries while developing countries remain uncommitted to binding emission reduction targets. However, cooperation between the industrialized and the developing world through joint...

To meet its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, the EU plans to implement an emissions trading system with grandfathering of allowances. Besides having distributional impacts, the choice of the grandfathering scheme may affect efficiency if firms anticipate how future allocations depend on...