US environmental policy cedes substantial authority to local agencies—creating potentials for polluters/governments to strategically export emissions. We identify such strategies among coal-fueled power plants. First, we document that electricity generators locate near administrative borders....

Recent changes to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards have created new opportunities for lowering the cost of meeting strict new standards through provisions for credit banking and trading. In this paper, we explore these new markets for reductions in both fuel consumption (fuel...

This essay revisits the question of instrument choice for the regulation of externalities in the context of climate change. The central point is that the Pigouvian prescription to equate marginal control costs with the expected marginal benefits of damage reduction should guide the design of...

We compare two tradable permit markets in their ability to meet a safety first environmental target at least cost when some polluters have stochastic, correlated, and non-measurable emissions. In both markets, the point source permit defines the allowable level of the observed (deterministic)...

Legal challenges and transitions of political power cause the future of regulatory policies to be uncertain. In this article, I investigate how uncertainty about environmental policy affects investment and emissions at coal-fired power plants. I exploit a legal challenge to the Clean Air...

The pace of urbanisation, the intensity of energy consumption, and the quality of environmental regulation level pose a severe threat to environmental sustainability in Africa. Hence, we examine the role of regulatory quality on environmental pollution through urbanisation and energy consumption...

In cities around the world, Covid-19 lockdowns have improved outdoor air quality, in some cases dramatically. Even if only temporary, these improvements could have longer-lasting effects on policy by making chronic air pollution more salient and boosting political pressure for change. To that...

Government policies that are not intended to address environmental concerns can nonetheless distort prices and affect firms' emissions. We present an analytical general equilibrium model to study the effect of distortionary subsidies on factor prices and on environmental outcomes. We model an...

Les mécanismes du marché ne pourront résoudre qu'une part du défi climatique : la taxe carbone s'avère nécessaire pour impliquer tous les émetteurs, petits et grands. Comment voyez-vous le marché global du carbone évoluer dans les années à venir ? Il va certainement bien se...

On a theoretical front, environmental economists have one last pollution problem to contend with and that is the issue of non-point source pollution (NPSP). The issue of NPSP is important on many levels but central to this field is how to efficiently regulate what you cannot observe? A promising...