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Environmental policy --- Social responsibility of business --- Voluntarism --- Citizen participation
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The pollution haven hypothesis suggests that unilateral domestic climate change mitigation policy would impose significant economic costs on carbon-intensive industries, resulting in declining output and increasing net imports. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, we undertake a two-step empirical analysis. First, we use historic energy prices as a proxy for climate change mitigation policy. We estimate how production and net imports change in response to energy prices using a 35-year panel of approximately 450 U.S. manufacturing industries. Second, we take these estimated relationships and use them to simulate the impacts of changes in energy prices resulting from a domestic climate change mitigation policy that effectively imposes a $15 per ton carbon price. We find that energy-intensive manufacturing industries are more likely to experience decreases in production and increases in net imports than less-intensive industries. Our best estimate is that competitiveness effects – measured by the increase in net imports – are as large as 0.8 percent for the most energy-intensive industries and represent no more than about one-sixth of the estimated decrease in production under a $15 per ton carbon price.
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Given that technologies to significantly reduce fossil fuel emissions are currently unavailable or only available at high cost, technological change will be a key component of any long-term strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In light of this, the amount of research on the pace, direction, and benefits of environmentally-friendly technological change has grown dramatically in recent years. This research includes empirical work estimating the magnitude of these effects, and modeling exercises designed to simulate the importance of endogenous technological change in response to climate policy. Unfortunately, few attempts have been made to connect these two streams of research. This paper attempts to bridge that gap. We review both the empirical and modeling literature on technological change. Our focus includes the research and development process, learning by doing, the role of public versus private research, and technology diffusion. Our goal is to provide an agenda for how both empirical and modeling research in these areas can move forward in a complementary fashion. In doing so, we discuss both how models used for policy evaluation can better capture empirical phenomena, and how empirical research can better address the needs of models used for policy evaluation.
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Carbon markets are substantial and they are expanding. There are many lessons from experiences over the past eight years: fewer free allowances, better management of market-sensitive information, and a recognition that trading systems require adjustments that have consequences for market participants and market confidence. Moreover, the emerging international architecture features separate emissions trading systems serving distinct jurisdictions. These programs are complemented by a variety of other types of policies alongside the carbon markets. This sits in sharp contrast to the integrated global trading architecture envisioned 15 years ago by the designers of the Kyoto Protocol and raises a suite of new questions. In this new architecture, jurisdictions with emissions trading have to decide how, whether, and when to link with one another, and policymakers overseeing carbon markets must confront how to measure the comparability of efforts among markets as well as relative to a variety of other policy approaches.
Carbon offsetting. --- Carbon --- Emissions trading --- Environmental policy --- Environmental aspects. --- Econometric models.
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This paper considers how policy updates and trading of regulated quantities over time changes the traditional comparative advantage of prices versus quantities. Quantity regulation that can be traded over time leads firms to set current prices equal to expected future prices. A government seeking to maximize net societal benefits can take advantage of this behavior with a sequence of quantity policy updates that achieves the first best in all periods. Under price regulation where current prices remain fixed until future policy changes occur, no such opportunity exists to achieve the first best, and prices are never preferred. However, if we assume policy updates are driven in part by political "noise" rather than maximizing net societal benefits, the result changes and prices can again be preferred. The comparative advantage now depends the relative variance of noise shocks compared to true cost and benefit shocks. This contrasts sharply with the traditional comparative advantage that depends on the relative slopes of marginal costs and benefits. Applied to climate change, we estimate the comparative advantage of intertemporally tradable quantities (over prices) to be $2 billion over five years. This estimate grows if updates occur less frequently or could be made negative by political noise.
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