Author: Peter HeindlPublisher:
ISBN: 9783830070719
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
Environmental Regulation by Prices and Quantities
Author: Peter HeindlPublisher:
ISBN: 9783830070719
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
The Costs and Benefits of Environmental Regulation
Author: Imad A. MoosaPublisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1782549242
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
øThe authors present an extensive survey of the empirical evidence on the determinants of environmental performance as well as the effects of environmental regulation on the costs of production, plant location, firm-level productivity, stock prices and
Prices Vs. Quantities
Author: Erin MansurPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Environmental policy
Languages : en
Pages : 52
Book Description
In a market subject to environmental regulation, a firm's strategic behavior affects the production and emissions decisions of all firms. If firms are regulated by a Pigouvian tax, changing emissions will not affect the marginal cost of polluting. However, under a tradable permits system, the polluters' decisions affect the permit price. This paper shows that this feedback effect may increase a strategic firm's output. Relative to a tax, tradable permits improve welfare in a market with imperfect competition. As an application, I model strategic and competitive behavior of wholesalers in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland electricity market. Simulations suggest that exercising market power decreased local pollution by approximately nine percent, and therefore, substantially reduced the price of the region's pollution permits. Furthermore, I find that had regulators opted to use a tax instead of permits, the deadweight loss from imperfect competition would have been approximately seven percent greater.
Price-Based Vs. Quantity-Based Environmental Regulation Under Knightian Uncertainty
Author: John StranlundPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Conventional wisdom among environmental economists is that the relative slopes of the marginal social benefit and marginal social cost functions determine whether a price-based or quantity-based environmental regulation leads to higher expected social welfare. We revisit the choice between price-based vs. quantity-based environmental regulation under Knightian uncertainty; that is, when uncertainty cannot be modeled with known probability distributions. Under these circumstances, the policy objective cannot be to maximize the expected net benefits of emissions control. Instead, we evaluate an emissions tax and an aggregate abatement standard in terms of maximizing the range of uncertainty under which the welfare loss from error in the estimates of the marginal benefits and costs of emissions control can be limited. The main result of our work is that the same criterion involving the relative slopes of the marginal benefit and cost functions determines whether price-based or quantity-based control is more robust to unstructured uncertainty. Hence, not only does the relative slopes criterion lead to the policy that maximizes the expected net benefits of control under structured uncertainty, it also leads to the policy that maximizes robustness to unstructured uncertainty.
"Prices Vs. Quantities at the Inter-country Level"
Author: Hannes Moritz RohlingThree Essays on the Theory of Environmental Regulation
Author: Insung SonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
This dissertation contains three original essays in the economic theory of environmental regulation. The main motivations for this work are two problems: the design of greenhouse gas (GHG) policies when emissions of these gases interact with so-called co-pollutants and the design of hybrid price and quantity policies to deal with the uncertainty in the benefits and costs of controlling GHG emissions. Abstract Concerns about how best to control GHGs have generated intense interest in the co-benefits and adverse side-effects of climate policies. Efforts to reduce CO2 emissions can reduce emissions of flow pollutants that are emitted along with CO2, which provides a co-benefit of climate policy. However, it is not always the case that efforts to reduce CO2 emissions have positive co-benefits. The challenge of climate change has also intensified research in policy design under uncertainty about the benefits and costs of controlling GHG emissions. Literature on this problem suggest that a carbon tax is more efficient than carbon trading. However, given that many existing GHG control policies feature tradable permit markets, there have been a lot of interest and innovation in hybrid schemes. The most popular form of these hybrids involves tradable emissions permits with price controls. While there is a significant literature on designing hybrid price and quantity environmental regulations under uncertainty, and another literature on regulating multiple interacting pollutants, no one has addressed the design of an emission markets with price controls for a pollutant that interacts with a co-pollutant in emission control. In Chapter 2, we investigate the optimal regulation of a pollutant given its abatement interaction with another pollutant under asymmetric information about firms' abatement costs. The co-pollutant is regulated, but perhaps not efficiently. Our focus is on optimal instrument choice in this setting, and we derive rules for determining whether a pollutant should be regulated with an emissions tax, tradable permits, or an emissions market with price controls. The policy choices depend on the relative slopes of the damage functions for both pollutants and the aggregate marginal abatement cost function, including whether the pollutants are complements or substitutes in abatement and whether the co-pollutant is controlled with a tax or tradable permits. In Chapter 3, we extend the model in Chapter 2 by allowing a pollutant to interact with a co-pollutant in both abatement and damage. In this situation, we examine the expected performance of optimal price-based regulations for the primary pollutant. We find that, given exogenous but possibly inefficient regulation of a co-pollutant, an optimal permit market, an optimal tax, and an optimal permit market with price controls all produce the same expected emissions for the primary pollutant, which deviates from its ex ante optimal emissions if the co-pollutant is regulated inefficiently. This deviation depends on 1) the interactions of the two pollutants in abatement costs and damages, 2) the deviation of the expected emissions of the co-pollutant from its ex ante optimal emissions, and 3) whether it is regulated with a fixed number of tradable permits or an emissions tax. Another important concern about permit trading has been how much regulations induce investments in abatement capital or technology. As concern about cost containment has increased, the effects of cost-containment policies on abatement investments have gained attention among researchers. In Chapter 4 we examine the effects of a hybrid policy on investment in abatement capital. We construct a dynamic stochastic model to study the decision to invest in irreversible abatement capital under an emissions market with price controls. We consider investment decisions in an emissions market with price controls, and compare these to the decisions in a market without price controls. We found that a price floor tends to increase the opportunity of investment while a price ceiling always reduces the opportunity of investment by imposing an upper bound of investment intervals. Under a hybrid regulation there exists an upper bound of abatement capital stock such that no additional investment occurs. No such upper bound exists for a pure permit trading. On the other hand, there may exist investment opportunities for low marginal abatement costs under a hybrid policy that are not available under a pure permit trading. However, when investments are required under both regulations, increases in capital stock under a hybrid regulation are likely to be less than under pure permit trading.
Moving to Markets in Environmental Regulation
Author: Jody FreemanPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198040865
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 501
Book Description
Over the last decade, market-based incentives have become the regulatory tool of choice when trying to solve difficult environmental problems. Evidence of their dominance can be seen in recent proposals for addressing global warming (through an emissions trading scheme in the Kyoto Protocol) and for amending the Clean Air Act (to add a new emissions trading systems for smog precursors and mercury--the Bush administration's "Clear Skies" program). They are widely viewed as more efficient than traditional command and control regulation. This collection of essays takes a critical look at this question, and evaluates whether the promises of market-based regulation have been fulfilled. Contributors put forth the ideas that few regulatory instruments are actually purely market-based, or purely prescriptive, and that both approaches can be systematically undermined by insufficiently careful design and by failures of monitoring and enforcement. All in all, the essays recommend future research that no longer pits one kind of approach against the other, but instead examines their interaction and compatibility. This book should appeal to academics in environmental economics and law, along with policymakers in government agencies and advocates in non-governmental organizations.
Environmental Costs of Natural Resource Commodities
Author: Margaret E. SladePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 36
Book Description
What would happen to resource production, consumption, and revenue if the developing countries adopted the environmental standards set by the industrial countries, while at the same time the industrial countries increased their spending on environmental protection by the same fraction as the developing countries?
Prices Versus Quantities
Author: Shi-Ling HsuPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 16
Book Description
Within the world of market mechanisms, two parallel ideas have been formative in the developing discourse on environmental policy: a "price instrument" through a Pigouvian tax, and a "quantity instrument" through a Dalesian emissions trading instrument. Over time, these simple theoretical ideas have developed variants out of political and administrative necessity, which have blurred distinctions and sometimes detracted from the environmental and economic advantages of market mechanisms. That said, a juxtaposition of price instruments with quantity instruments is useful for comparing the administrative and welfare implications. This chapter reviews the relative advantages and disadvantages of price and quantity instruments, with a special concern for climate policy.
Three Essays on Prices Vs. Quantities in Environmental Policy
Author: Iris Maria OberaunerPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 101
Book Description