Black carbon particulates in “soot” emissions have significant detrimental impacts on public health, climate change and food production; and diesel engines in the transportation sector are a major source of such emissions. There are cost-effective technologies that can mitigate the emissions. However, a wide range of policies at all levels of government are needed to incentivize the uptake of emission-mitigating technologies.
Market-based regulation, and in particular Pigovian taxes/subsidies, have the potential to make consumers internalize socially harmful external effects associated with their choices. Recent behavioral literature, however, suggests that explicit financial penalties/rewards may undermine willingness to behave prosocially.
Electricity sector restructuring processes can undergo long, protracted transition periods that are not well-captured in typical power systems operation models. We create a tractable dispatch optimization with important political considerations for a region of China, demonstrating interactions among institutions relevant for ongoing power sector reforms.
U.S. nuclear reactors have been retiring at an unprecedented pace for the last few years. Tens of gigawatts of zero-emission nuclear capacity are now at risk of retiring prematurely, before the end of their operating license. We examine the root causes of this phenomena and discuss regulatory options for policymakers.
The impact of environmental regulation on firm productivity has been long been debated, however, mainly for western economies and with limited firm-level evidence. We study the impact of a large-scale national energy saving program in China on firm productivity in the iron and steel industry and find positive effects on productivity growth.
The existence of a forest-savanna tipping point implies that changes in forest resilience affect the marginal economic value of a standing forest. We propose a new framework for calculating the economic value of a standing tropical forest, and explore the implications of tipping points on the design of optimal land-use policy and payments for ecosystem services.
When do states drive green industrial change? We show that in mature industries with powerful incumbents the ability of the state to organize private interests in support of technological change is...
Environmental standards can affect new-equipment sales and used-equipment retirements. We identify two additional effects, of anticipation, on the flow and stock of regulated equipment, and discuss...
In a new CEEPR Working Paper, Ian Schneider and Mardavij Roozbehani explain how existing production-based subsidies for wind energy bias marginal investments to underweight the market value of...
How much shale oil do we have left? And how much of that can be recovered economically? A new estimation technique suggests that, in the Bakken play, roughly 8 billion barrels of the remaining...