Without a broad international agreement, climate policy is less effective, owing to carbon leakage. We investigate whether this negative effect can be addressed by partially containing the policy's effects to intermediate goods sectors, such as electricity or transportation services. We use a...

In the absence of a broad international agreement, national climate policiesare less efficient, due to carbon leakage, and more costly, due to causingunemployment and a loss of competitiveness on international markets. As,in many countries, a substantial fraction of emissions results from the...

Empirical investigation by dynamic panel data models of the determinants of democracy shows a strong positive neighbor effect. Foreign aid is stabilizing but not inducing democratic development, while there is no significant relationship to openness to trade and income.

In this paper we take a public choice perspective on strategic environmental policy and international environmental agreements. We examine cooperative and noncooperative environmental policies under governments that are either welfare maximizers ("good dictators") or tax revenue maximizers...

A carbon tax is an efficient economic instrument to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide released from fossil fuel burning. If designed properly, it could also help significantly to promote renewable energy. Using a multi-sector, multi-country computable general equilibrium model this study...

Inducing technological progress is an important objective of environmental regulation. We investigate under which conditions regulation-induced technological progress pursues the best technological option. We analyze a setting with vertical and horizontal technological progress, cost...

Under uncertainty, the optimal choice between price and quantity instruments depends on the technology of the regulated firms, which is often private information. We consider an environmental policy that delegates the prices-versus-quantities decision to the firms by offering them the choice...

Regulating the emissions of non-uniformly mixed pollutants with a permit market carries the risk of hot spot formation, which can be reduced by dividing the regulation area into trading zones. The trading zone approach has been extensively discussed for the full-information case. We consider...

Environmental policy often has to be devised under informational constraints,like uncertainty and asymmetric information. We consider an environmentalpolicy that aims at reducing the welfare losses caused by asymmetricinformation while being sufficiently simple for implementation. Inthis policy,...