Starting in 2005, the EU will implement a CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> emissions trading scheme. We show that the outspoken objectives of economic efficiency and free allocation of allowances are incompatible with harmonized allocation rules. The latter would be necessary to avoid unequal changes of the financial...</subscript>

<Para ID="Par1">We investigate political economy determinants of energy tax differentiation across industries. Based on a theoretical common agency model, we show that differences in the ease of energy demand reductions across industries explain the pattern of tax differentiation: if the government is...</para>

Carbon leakage provides an efficiency argument for differentiated emission prices in favor of emission-intensive and trade-exposed sectors under unilateral climate policy. However, differential emission pricing can be used as a beggar-thy-neighbor policy to exploit terms of trade. Adopting an...

Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

To meet its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, the EU plans to implement an emissions trading system with grandfathering of allowances. Besides having distributional impacts, the choice of the grandfathering scheme may affect efficiency if firms anticipate how future allocations depend on...

In 2005, an EU-wide emissions trading scheme covering major CO2 producing sites shall come into power. The key objective of the trading scheme is to promote cost-efficiency of carbon reduction within the EU. We identify policy-relevant tradeoffs between overall efficiency, compensation and...

Implementation of an EU-wide emissions trading system by means of National Allocation Plans is at the core of European environmental policy agenda. Member States are faced with the problem of allocating their national emission budgets under the EU Burden Sharing Agreement between...

In this paper we study political-economy determinants of the differentiation of environmental taxes between sectors. Using a common-agency model, we provide predictions on tax differentiation which are then tested using data from the German Ecological Tax Reform. As the reform is revenue neutral...

Starting in 2005, the EU will implement a CO2 emissions trading scheme. In this paper we show that the outspoken goals of economic efficiency and free allocation of allowances are incompatible with harmonized allocation rules. In general, the assignment of allowances is endogenous and differs...