A tradeable permits market is said to be efficient when all affected firms trade permits until their marginal costs equal the market price. Detailed firm-level data are generally required to perform such an efficiency test, yet such information is rarely available. If firms face a declining...

We consider a market for storable pollution permits in which a large agent and a fringe of small agents gradually consume a stock of permits until they reach a long-run emissions limit. The subgame-perfect equilibrium exhibits no market power unless the large agent’s share of the initial stock...

I study the design of environmental policies for a regulator that has incomplete information on firms’ emissions and costs of production and abatement (e.g., air pollution in cities with numerous small polluting sources). Because of incomplete information on emissions, there is no policy that...

Following the structure of many commodity markets, we consider a few large firms and a competitive fringe of many small suppliers choosing quantities in an infinite-horizon setting subject to demand shocks. We show that a collusive agreement among the large firms may not only bring an output...

In this paper we discuss second-generation electricity reforms being formulated in Latin America and how they are being reshaped by the California crisis, which had stood as a paradigm, at least in theory, for fully competitive markets. We argue that the main lesson policy makers in Latin...

I study a regulatory process in which both the regulator and the regulated firm propose prices that in case of disagreement are settled through final-offer arbitration – a practice currently used in Chile for setting prices in the water sector. Rather than submitting a single offer, each party...

It has been long recognized that an exhaustible-resource monopsonist faces a commitment problem similar to that of a durable-good monopolist. Indeed, Hörner and Kamien (2004) demonstrate that the two problems are formally equivalent under full commitment. We show that there is no such...

As with other commodity markets, markets for trading pollution permits have not been immune to market power concerns. In this paper, I survey the existing literature on market power in permit trading but also contribute with some new results and ideas. I start the survey with Hahn’s (1984)...

I explore the advantages of tradable emission permits over uniform emission standards when the regulator has incomplete information on firms’ emissions and costs of production and abatement (e.g., air pollution in large cities). Because the regulator only observes each firm’s abatement...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the temporal efficiency of the U.S. Acid Rain Program, which implemented a nationwide market for trading and banking sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances. We first develop a model of efficient banking and select appropriate parameter values....