Cap-and-trade systems limit emissions to some pre-specified absolute quantity. Intensity-based limits, that restrict emissions to some pre-specified rate relative to input or output, are much more widely used in environmental regulation and have gained attention recently within the context of...

Provisions to endow new entrants with free allowances and to require closed facilities to forfeit allowance endowments are ubiquitous in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, but a new design feature in cap-and-trade systems. This essay seeks to explore, within a comparative statics framework, the...

From oil, to natural gas, and now electricity, the regulation of energy markets has been successively restructured to allow greater scope to market forces. The likely next domain for restructuring, environmental regulation, may seem far fetched now, but it is no more so than the restructuring of...

Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol allows Annex B parties to meet their greenhouse gas emissions commitments by emissions trading so long as such trading is "supplemental" to domestic abatement actions. Whether and how "supplemental" should be defined is one of the most contentious issues in the...

Policies under consideration within the Climate Convention would impose CO2 controls on only a subset of nations. A model of economic growth and emissions, coupled to an analysis of the climate system, is used to explore the consequences of a sample proposal of this type. The results show how...

This paper summarizes recent empirical research on compliance costs and strategies and on permit market performance under the U.S. acid rain program, the first large-scale, long-term program to use tradeable emissions permits to control pollution. An efficient market for emissions permits...