Instability in cap-and-trade markets, particularly with respect to permit price collapses has been an area of concern for regulators. To that end, several policies, including hybrid price-quantity mechanisms and the newly introduced "market stability reserve" (MSR) systems have been introduced...

This paper examines the performance of the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF), a federally funded program to provide loans to local publically owned treatment works (POTWs) in four states: Iowa, Indiana, Maryland and Texas. We find that between 2007 and 2014, the typical plant receiving a...

Many supermarkets offer grocery-gasoline bundled discounts, whereby a supermarket customer whose grocery purchase exceeds a certain dollar amount is offered a gasoline price discount. I use the difference-in-differences method and an ideal gasoline price data set to study such programs' effects...

We explore the impact of bicycle-sharing infrastructure on urban transportation. Accounting for selection bias in a matching framework, we estimate a causal effect of the Capital Bikeshare on traffic congestion in the metropolitan Washington, DC, area. We exploit a unique traffic dataset that is...

Sectoral greenhouse gas offsets can provide the same incentives for emissions reductions as a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, with a focus on rewards rather than costs. This paper develops a pilot analysis of such offsets using relatively transparent quantitative methods to estimate a...

Under discussion in the US Congress is the desirability of reforming much of the US federal tax code. Recent proposals include lowering rates and broadening the tax base by, among other things, eliminating tax expenditure write-offs, preferences, and incentives. This study focuses on tax changes...

Retrospective analysis of federal environmental regulation aims to rigorously document the extent to which key policy objectives have been attained and at what cost. This paper reports the results of nine new case studies involving a total of 34 cost or benefit/effectiveness comparisons from a...

Regular vines or vine copula provide a rich class of multivariate densities with arbitrary one dimensional margins and Gaussian or non-Gaussian dependence structures. The density enables calculation of all conditional distributions, in particular, regression functions for any subset of variables...

Efforts to limit cumulative emissions over the next century may be partially thwarted by the responses of fossil fuel suppliers. Current price-cost margins for major reserves are ample, leaving scope for significant price reductions if climate policies reduce demand for fossil fuels through...

In the past decade, innovations in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have fueled a boom in the production of natural gas (as well as oil) from geological formations — primarily deep shales — in which hydrocarbon production was previously unprofitable. Impacts on US fossil fuel...