We evaluate the performance of an environmental market in a less developed country on the basis of the experiences of the particulate matter control program of Santiago, Chile. We find that grandfathering the permits has created economic incentives for incumbent sources to more readily declare...

I explore the advantages of tradable emission permits over uniform emission standards when the regulator has incomplete information on firms’ emissions and costs of production and abatement (e.g., air pollution in large cities). Because the regulator only observes each firm’s abatement...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the temporal efficiency of the U.S. Acid Rain Program, which implemented a nationwide market for trading and banking sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances. We first develop a model of efficient banking and select appropriate parameter values....

Despite the increasing interest in the use of emissions trading for pollution control, empirical evidence reduces to a few experiences in the US. This paper studies the “"emission-offsets trading program”" established since 1992 to control particulate in Santiago-Chile. While the program is...

We consider a pollution permit market with a large firm and fringe of competitive firms. To smooth compliance towards a long-run emissions goal, firms are initially allocated a stock (i.e., bank) of permits that can be gradually consumed. We first show how the large firm can credibly manipulate...

I study a regulatory process in which both the regulator and the regulated firm propose prices that, in case of disagreement, are settled through final-offer arbitration (FOA)—a practice currently used in Chile for setting prices in the water sector. Rather than submitting a single offer, each...