Cost containment has emerged as a major point of contention in the current congressional debate about designing a cap-and-trade program to limit future U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper reviews basic concepts and policy options for cost management, drawing on a March 2008 workshop...

Welfare comparisons of regulatory instruments under uncertainty have typically focused on price versus quantity controls. This is true even in dynamic analyses of cumulative pollutants and despite the presence of banking and to some extent borrowing provisions in existing emission trading...

Choices in energy regulation, particularly whether and how to price externalities, can have widely different distributional consequences both across and within income groups. Traditional welfare theory focuses largely on effects across income groups; such "vertical equity" concerns can typically...

Despite popularity among economists for their efficiency, energy pollution taxes enjoy less political support than standards-based regulation because of common perceptions that they burden the poor relative to the rich. However, the literature on pollution tax incidence and consumption surveys...