This paper extends the transmission framework from Joskow and Tirole (2005) to show how intermittent renewable capacity increases interact with transmission constraints both theoretically and empirically. The main prediction of the model is that transmission congestion leads to mitigated benefits from renewables due to lack of electricity to be traded to high priced market settlement points. We...

In this paper I model the optimal monitoring and enforcement strategy when inspection capacity is fixed by budget or manpower constraints. I adopt a leverage enforcement structure that classifies firms into two groups with different enforcement intensities. Optimal monitoring and enforcement requires effective allocation of the fixed number of inspections to the two groups. In each period, a fi...

Many countries are using a mix of two policy instruments to induce consumers to reduce their energy use: On the one hand, they rely on moral suasion in order to seed and nourish ’green’ motives. On the other, there is the use of regulatory instruments such as energy taxes and command-and-control to affect behavior using external incentives. While conventional theory would assume motives and inc...

Labor Demand Effects of Rising Electricity Prices: Evidence for Germany Germany plays a pioneering role in replacing conventional power plants with renewable energy sources. While this is beneficial with respect to environmental quality, the energy turnaround implies increasing electricity prices for private households and firms. The extent to which this is associated with negative impacts on e...

Municipalities introduced unit-based pricing (UBP) with the aim of achieving a decrease in household waste generation and for the replacement of unsorted waste with recycling. Although many studies have shown that UBP has a short-run effect on recycling, few works have tackled the long-run effect on waste generation and recycling. By using panel data for 665 Japanese cities over 8 years, we exa...

In recent years some of the most influential policies have been either tested or evaluated using experimental methods. Experiments have provided significant insights on the implications of different designs on market outcomes and the lessons learned have helped improve academic debate and the interaction between policy makers and researchers. In this paper we provide an overview of experiments ...

The social cost of carbon – or marginal damage caused by an additional ton of carbon dioxide emissions – has been estimated by a U.S. government working group at $21/tCO2 in 2010. That calculation, however, omits many of the biggest risks associated with climate change, and downplays the impact of current emissions on future generations. Our reanalysis explores the effects of uncertainty about ...

Paragraph 31(iii) of the Doha Ministerial Declaration mandates to the liberalization of environmental goods and services. This mandate offers a good opportunity to put climate-friendly goods and services on a fast track to liberalization. Agreement on this paragraph should represent one immediate contribution that the WTO can make to fight against climate change. This paper presents the key iss...

This paper investigates the extent to which cleanup durations at Superfund sites reflect demographic biases incongruent with the principles of Environmental Justice. We argue that the duration of cleanup, conditional on a large number of site characteristics, should be independent of the race and income profile of the neighborhood in which the site is located. Since the demographic composition ...

This article analyzes the long-term consequences of nuclear waste storage within a general equilibrium framework. The objective is to determine the conditions for which the storage of waste, and thus the transfer of externalities towards the future, can be optimal. These conditions could explain the implementation of intergenerational externalities, justifying an intertemporal Not In My Back Ya...