McCallum (1995, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 85 (2), 207-211) conjectures that delegation merely relocates the commitment problem but does not solve it. This holds if optimal ex-ante policies do not change if additional information becomes available. However, with a...

The literature on environmental R&D frequently studies innovation as a two-stage process, with a single R&D event leading from a conventional polluting technology to a perfectly clean backstop. We allow for uncertainty in innovation in that the new technology may turn out to generate a new...

We study the optimal R&D trajectory in a setting where new technologies are never perfect backstops in the sense that there is no perfectly clean technology that eventually solves the pollution problem once and for all. New technologies have stings attached, i.e. each emits a specific stock...

Most real world emission permit schemes are in effect hybrid instruments that feature both quantity and price controls. While the effects of price bounds are well understood for issues such as uncertain abatement costs it has not been investigated how such bounds affect time-consistency of...

The performance of market based environmental regulation is affected by patents and vice versa. This interaction is studied for a new type of innovation where new technologies reduce emissions of a specific pollutant but at the same time cause a new type of damage. A robust finding is that the...

We often use delegation as a commitment device if a government faces problems of timeinconsistency. McCallum (1995, AER P&P) challenged this practice, claiming that delegation merely relocates the commitment problem but does not solve it. In a model where delegation and specific policies are...

In areas such as climate change, the recent economic literature has been emphasizing and addressing the pervasive presence of uncertainty. This paper considers a new and salient form of uncertainty, namely uncertainty regarding the environmental characteristics of 'green' innovations. Here, R&D...