Putting a price on carbon is critical for climate change policy. Increasingly, policymakers combine multiple policy tools to achieve this, for example by complementing cap-and-trade schemes with a carbon tax, or with a feed-in tariff. Often, the motivation for doing so is to limit undesirable...

Cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gas emissions are an important part of the climate change policies of the EU, Japan, New Zealand, among others, as well as China (soon) and Australia (potentially). However, concerns have been raised on a variety of ethical grounds about the use of markets to...

Debate about the relationship between environmental limits and economic growth has been taking place for several decades. These arguments have re-emerged with greater intensity following advances in the understanding of the economics of climate change, increases in resource and oil prices and...

Many models of economic growth exclude materials, energy and other intermediate inputs from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate. This paper explores the relationship between intermediate input intensity,...

This paper analyses the design of carbon markets in time (intertemporally) and space (geographically) from first principles, starting initially with a relatively clean slate and asking what an optimal global carbon market would look like by around 2030. Our focus is on firmlevel trading systems,...

Conventional benefit-cost analysis incorporates the normally reasonable assumption that the policy or project under examination is marginal. In particular, it is assumed that the policy or project does not change the underlying growth rate of the economy. However, this assumption may be...

Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employedto encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbontax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology,yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce the...

Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employed to encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbon tax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology, yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce...