Motu and partners were contracted by the World Bank through its Partnership for Market Readiness (PMR) initiative to “Draft a proposal for the implementation in Chile of a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System (ETS)”. The specific objective in the terms of reference is to “Propose a...

This paper studies a phase-in emissions trading program with voluntary opt-in possibilities for non-affected firms and derives optimal permits allocations to affected and opt-in firms when the environmental regulator has incomplete information on individual unrestricted emissions and control...

I study the optimal design of marketable permit systems to regulate various pollutants (e.g., air pollution in urban areas) when the regulator lives in a real world of imperfect information and incomplete enforcement. I show that the regulator should have pollution markets integrated through...

This paper studies firms' incentives to invest in environmental R&D under different market structures (Cournot and Bertrand) and environmental policy instruments (emission standards, taxes, tradable permits and auctioned permits). Because of market strategic effects, R&D incentives vary widely...

The paper studies the design of a treadable permit system with opt-in possibilities for LDCs countries in the context of climate change. In setting the optimal opt-in rule, the regulator faces a trade-off between production efficiency (minimization of control costs) and information rent...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the temporal efficiency of the U.S. Acid Rain Program, which implemented a nationwide market for trading and banking sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances. We first develop a model of efficient banking and select appropriate parameter values....

We evaluate the performance of an environmental market in a less developed country based on the experience from Santiago-Chile's particulate matter control program. We find that grandfathering the permits has created economic incentives for incumbent sources to more readily declare their...

I study the design of environmental policies for a regulator that has incomplete information on firms' emissions and costs of production and abatement (e.g., air pollution in cities with numerous small polluting sources). Because of incomplete information on emissions, there is no policy that...

A tradeable permits market is said to be efficient when all affected firms trade permits until their marginal costs equal the market price. Detailed firm-level data are generally required to perform such an efficiency test, yet such information is rarely available. If firms face a declining...