Prizes are receiving increasing attention in policy and entrepreneurial communities as means to promote innovation, but their distinguishing features remain inadequately understood. Models of patents treat winning a patent as winning a prize; other models distinguish prizes primarily as public...

Biomass, a renewable energy source, has been viewed as "carbon neutral" - that is, its use as energy is presumed not to release net carbon dioxide. However, this assumption of carbon neutrality has recently been challenged. In 2010 two letters were sent to the Congress by eminent scientists...

This paper describes specific ways in which the analysis of ecosystem goods and services can be included in terrestrial carbon sequestration assessments and planning. It specifically reviews the U.S. Geological Survey’s LandCarbon assessment methodology for ecosystem services. The report...

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 led to the deaths of 11 workers, a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf, and nearly three months of massive engineering and logistics efforts to stop the spill. The series of failures before the well was...

The U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 initiated the first large experiment in the use of market-based regulation to control environmental problems with the introduction of an emissions trading program for sulfur dioxide emissions. Later that decade the second large trading program began for...

The Clean Air Act has assumed the central role in US climate policy, directing the development of regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. This paper examines the operation of coal-fired generating units over 25 years to estimate the marginal costs...

We evaluate the approach currently used by the World Bank to measure exposure to outdoor air pollution and associated economic costs, as reported in the World Development Indicators database. We recommend that current exposure estimates, based on an econometric model, be replaced by estimates...

Links between emission trading programs are not immutable, as highlighted by New Jersey's exit from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. This raises the question of what to do with existing permits that are banked for future use -- choices that have consequences for market behavior in advance...

This paper has two purposes. The first is to review the emerging literature on green growth, with a focus on the origin and meaning of the concept, as well as the justifications for and criticisms of the concept. The general idea of taking into account the impact of economic growth policies on...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an elementary introduction to the nonrenewable resource model with multiple demand curves. The theoretical literature following Hotelling (1931) assumed that all energy needs are satisfied by one type of resource (e.g. "oil"), extractable at different...