Carbon taxes are commonly seen as a rational policy response to climate change, but little is known about their performance from an ex-post perspective. This paper analyzes the emissions and cost impacts of the UK CPS, a carbon tax levied on all fossil-fired power plants. To overcome the problem...

Carbon pricing is becoming increasingly common but raises equity concerns and is frequently perceived as putting higher burdens on the poor than the rich. This chapter discusses the reasons for unequal carbon price burdens across countries and population groups, through the lens of a comparative...

The United Kingdom is among world leaders in reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions, and a broad political consensus supports the target to reduce net emissions to zero by 2050. The UK’s strong institutional framework is an inspiration to countries around the world, and the country is...

While carbon taxes are generally seen as a rational policy response to climate change, knowledge about their performance from an expost perspective is still limited. This paper analyzes the emissions and cost impacts of the UK CPS, a carbon tax levied on all fossil-fired power plants. To...

All European Union (EU) member states have to comply with the demanding recycling rates targets that were set for the recovery of packaging waste in the Directive 94/62/EC. Nevertheless, each country has its own system for accomplishing these targets. Some already had national legislation when...

We examine an incentive scheme for a group of agents, where all agents are rewarded if the group meets its target. If the group does not meet its target, only the agents that meet their individual target are rewarded. In environmental policy, the EU burden sharing agreement and the UK Climate...

This study estimates that the introduction of a carbon tax in the British power sector in 2013 and its two subsequent elevations in 2014 and 2015 led to a substantial decline in emissions by 26% (or 36.3 MtCO 2 ) in only three years. Identification of the causal effect relies on discontinuities...

This paper presents new simulation results for the UK combining macroeconomic simulations in ThreeME, a computable general equilibrium model, with household-level micro-simulations with the aim to provide consistent estimates of macroeconomic and distributional consequences of policy action to...

As part of a spending-review policy at the beginning of the 2010 sovereign debt crisis, the Italian central government progressively reduced the municipal council size and the number of municipal executive board members. This paper exploits these reforms of the local political system as...