This paper outlines recent developments in U.S. climate policies. Although the United States does not participate in the Kyoto Mechanism, a number of climate policies are being implemented at state level as well as at the federal level. First, we report and compare the federal cap and trade...

A carbon tax will interact with other policies that are intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and encourage clean sources of energy and energy efficiency. This paper examines these policy interactions. A well-designed carbon tax can be an efficient instrument for reducing emissions, yet...

This article develops the first measures of age-industry job risks to examine the age variations in the value of statistical life. Because of the greater risk vulnerability of older workers, they face flatter wage-risk gradients than younger workers, which we show to be the case empirically....

Decisionmakers considering policies to mitigate climate change will benefit from information about current and future distributions of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Examining the emissions dynamics of advanced economies that have experienced income convergence could provide insights about how...

Understanding and considering the distribution of per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is important in designing international climate change proposals and incentives for participation. I evaluate historic international emissions distributions and forecast future distributions to assess...

We critically review the Kyoto Protocol and thirteen alternative policy architectures for addressing the threat of global climate change. We employ six criteria to evaluate the policy proposals: environmental outcome, dynamic efficiency, cost effectiveness, equity, flexibility in the presence of...

We derive conditions under which cost-increasing measures -- consistent with either regulatory constraints or fully expropriated taxes -- can increase the profits of all agents active within a common-pool resource. This somewhat counterintuitive result is possible regardless of whether price is...

Many environmentalists and policymakers are shifting their focus from media-specific pollution problems to product-specific, life-cycle environmental problems. In this paper, we develop a model of production and consumption that incorporates life-cycle environmental externalities—specifically,...

A number of state public utility commissions are using "social costing" methods to consider externalities in electricity resource planning. The most comprehensive and formal method is the use of monetary place-holders in the financial evaluation of new investments and potentially in system...

Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) established a market for transferable sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances among electric utilities. This market offers firms facing high marginal abatement costs the opportunity to purchase the right to emit SO2 from firms with lower...