The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act created a trading program in sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions that has served as the seminal example of how an emissions trading program could be designed. Yet despite its success, the trading program was essentially brought to an end by a series of...

The Chinese central government has approved the seven pilot carbon trading schemes. These seven pilot regions are deliberately selected to be at varying stages of development and are given considerable leeway to design their own schemes. These pilot trading schemes have features in common, but...

Using a world multi-sectoral, multi-regional trade model, this paper has investigated the economic and environmental implications of climate control coalitions cooperating on R&D investment that triggers low cost environmentally friendly technologies. We start with the Kyoto scenario where all...

China’s emerging standing in the world demands a major rethinking of its diplomatic strategies. Given its population size, geographical scale, economic power and military presence, China is poised to play a larger political role in the twenty-first century, and is thus perceived by the...

This paper provides a simple analytic approach for measuring the burden of carbon pricing that does not require sophisticated and numerically intensive economic models but which is not limited to restrictive assumptions of forward shifting of carbon prices. We also show how to adjust for the...

We analyze the distributional and efficiency impacts of different allowance allocation schemes for a national cap and trade system using the USREP model, a new recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy. We consider allocation schemes applied to a comprehensive...

In this paper, we introduce a new top-down approach to modeling the effects of publicly financed energy-efficiency programs on electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. The approach draws on a partial-adjustment econometric model of electricity demand and represents the results of a...

Economic theory suggests that with a pollution externality and learning spillovers related to renewable energy technologies, the optimal climate policy mix includes an emissions policy and an output subsidy to the learning industry. Instead of output subsidies, feed-in tariffs are often...

China has shifted control over resources and decision making to local governments and enterprises as the result of the economic reforms over the past three decades. This devolution of decision-making to local levels and enterprises has placed environmental stewardship in the hands of local...

We study residential demand for electricity and gas, working with nationwide household-level data that cover recent years, namely 1997-2007. Our dataset is a mixed panel/multi-year cross-sections of dwellings/households in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States as of 2008. To our...