Cap and trade (CAT) results in lower abatement costs relative to command and control, but might increase industry marginal abatement cost, resulting in higher equilibrium emissions. With lumpy investment, command and control leads to multiple investment equilibria and “regulatory uncertainty”. CAT, a first best policy, eliminates this uncertainty. Command and control policies cause firms to imi...

Global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty with learning. We provide stochastic dominance theorems that provide new insights into when abatement and investment into low carbon technology should increase in risk. We show that R&D into low-carbon technologies and near-term abatement are in some sense opposites in terms of risk. Abatement provides insuran...

Marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) are a favorite instrument to analyze international emissions trading. This paper focusses on the question of how to define MACCs in a general equilibrium context where the global abatement level influences energy prices and in turn national MACCs. We discuss the mechanisms theoretically and then use the CGE model DART for quantitative simulations. The resu...

The approximated cost-benefit function of pollution abatement from two integrated assessment models are employed in constructing of social welfare functions (SWF). Following a normative approach and evaluating equally the environmental goods in rich and poor countries, furthermore using distributional weights, a relation between elasticity of marginal utility e and inequality aversion parameter...

This paper examines how enforcement affects the structure and performance of emissions trading programs with price controls under uncertainty about firms’ abatement costs. The analysis highlights how an enforcement strategy can cause abatement-cost risk to be transmitted to enforcement costs via the price of permits. When this occurs, accommodating the effect of abatement-cost risk with an opti...

Since the study of Ellerman and Decaux (1998) marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) have become one of the favorite instruments to analyze the impacts of the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and emission trading. This paper shows that the MACC in one country depends via the link of world energy prices on the level of abatement in the rest of the world. The strength of the dependence is inf...

This paper studies countries’ incentives to develop advanced pollution abatement technology when technology may spillover across countries and pollution abatement is a global public good. We are motivated in part by the problem of global warming: a solution to this involves providing a global public good, and will surely require the development and implementation of new technologies. We show th...

We study the environmental and economic effects of public abatement in the presence of multiple stable steady-state ecological equilibria. The isocline for the stock of pollution features two stable branches, a good and a bad one. Assuming that the ecology is initially located on the upper (bad) branch of the isocline, the ecological equilibrium is hysteretic and a suitably designed temporary a...

Background One of the requirements of the Osun State smoke-free legislation is to ensure smoke-free enclosed and partially enclosed workplaces. This survey was conducted to assess the knowledge and attitude of workers in indoor bars, beer parlors and discotheques to smoke-free legislation in general and the Osun State smoke-free law in particular.   Methods A convenience sampling of 36 hospital...

As a consequence of the flexibility mechanisms incorporated in the Kyoto Protocol, incentive-based policies such as emissions trading and the clean development mechanism are being widely discussed in the context of greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement. This paper examines various issues related to incentive-based approaches for India. Some of the specific questions it addresses are: does India stand ...