This paper addresses the question of whether the oil price spike of 2003-2008 was a bubble. We document and discuss what is known about the level of speculation in the paper oil market. We then analyze the dynamics of the term structure of futures prices, both during the earlier period of...

The United States may soon have a market for carbon. If so, it will grow out of government regulation of carbon emissions in the form of a cap-and-trade system like the EU's Emissions Trading System for CO2 or the US Acid Rain Program for SO2. The efficient functioning of the market is key to...

This paper reviews fundamental concepts in environmental economics and explores theoretical results regarding the choice of the key policy instruments for the control of externalities: taxes, subsidies and marketable permits. The paper explains why today market mechanisms are increasingly being...

The decision of whether to retain forest or convert to another land use is affected by uncertainty over future land use returns. This paper examines the design of conservation payments to landowners under uncertainty. Payments are either indexed to the returns from deforestation (agriculture),...

The paper analyses the implications of landowners� option values in land allocation and derives policy recommendations for payments for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). Given that REDD will not represent a permanent change in the cumulative flux of carbon...

Equilibrium models have been proposed in literature with the aim of describing the evolution of the price of emission permits. This paper derives first a reduced-form model from an equilibrium model and thereby explains how existing reduced-form models are related to equilibrium models. Second,...