On efficiency grounds, the economics community has to date tended to emphasize price-based policies to address climate change -- such as taxes or a "safety-valve" price ceiling for cap-and-trade -- while environmental advocates have sought a more clear quantitative limit on emissions. This paper...

Offsets lower the cost of cap-and-trade programs but must be considered imperfect if they cannot exclude “non-additional” emissions reductions or sequestration gains that would have occurred in their absence. Non-additionality can be addressed by requiring project-level additionality tests,...

Terrestrial (biological) carbon sequestration is the process by which carbon dioxide (CO2) is removed from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and stored in terrestrial stocks of biomass or soil organic carbon. A ton of carbon (or CO2 equivalent) sequestered in terrestrial systems can be used...

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a consortium of Northeastern U.S. states that limit carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation through a regional emissions trading program. Since RGGI started in 2009, regional emissions have sharply dropped. We use econometric models...

On efficiency grounds, the economics community has to date tended to emphasize price-based policies to address climate change - such as taxes or a "safety-valve" price ceiling for cap-and-trade - while environmental advocates have sought a more clear quantitative limit on emissions. This paper...

The use of offsets can potentially improve a cap-and-trade system by lowering the overall cost of compliance, encourage mitigation from outside of the cap, and function as a bridge strategy, giving the regulated sectors time to innovate new low-carbon technologies and business plans. But offset...

Harvesting restrictions to protect the habitat of the northern spotted owl on federal forests in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) substantially reduced timber available for processing by the forest products industry. We consider the extent to which these restrictions may have altered the degree of...