1,720,988 research outputs found
PRICE CAP REGULATION OF FIRMS WITH MARKET POWER. EFFICIENCY, DISTRIBUTION AND COMPETITION
No full textGovernance and the Environment. The Role of the Modern State in the Face of Global Challenges
No full textDissecting environmental efficiency: The role of technology adoption and usage
No full textHow could firms best reduce their environmental impact? Should they change technology? Or could they do better with what they already have? This paper shows that one size does not fit all. We analyse a sample of polluting production plants (i.e. installations) regulated under the EU Emission Trading System. We employ a mixture model estimation to dissect environmental efficiency into a technology adoption component (what type of technology is used) and a technology usage component (how a technology is used). Our installation-level analysis shows that the share of installations adopting frontier technologies is about 21%. We also find that the average environmental efficiency gains that installations could reach by improving technology adoption and technology usage are 75% and 80% respectively. The analysis of balance-sheet data on parent companies reveals that better environmental technologies are adopted by larger, listed, multi-installation and international companies, while older firms and firms with higher intangible assets intensity more commonly show improved technology usage. © 2024 The Author
Digging into the Technological Dimension of Environmental Productivity
Full text linkWe propose a mixture model approach to identify locally optimal technologies and to dissect environmental productivity (output produced per unit of emission) into a technological and a managerial component. For a large sample of plants covered by the EU ETS, we find that the share of plants adopting the frontier technology is about 21%. We also find that the average output gains that plants could reach by adopting optimal technologies and managerial practices are 75% and 80% respectively. These results remain qualitatively similar after addressing endogeneity of emissions. Finally, we match EU ETS data with balance-sheet data on parent companies and find that better environmental technologies tend to be adopted by larger, listed, multi-plant and international companies, while older firms and firms with higher intangibles assets intensity more commonly show improved environmental management. Our results suggest that existing technologies have large unexploited potentials and deliver important insights for policy
Indirect Taxation, Public Pricing and Price Cap Regulation: a Synthesis
Full text linkIt is well known that many standard results on optimal taxation and tax reforms have a straightforward counterpart in the monopoly pricing context and the Ramsey-Boiteux pricing rule represents the most obvious and well known example of this connection. What is less acknowledged, maybe even by many regulatory economists, is that this parallelism exists also with respect to a number of properties that characterize some types of price cap regulation. This paper reviews the economic literature that explored such properties, showing that there is a strong parallelism between the price cap results that are surveyed in this paper and those originating from the well-established theories on optimal indirect taxation and tax reforms, as well as public pricing
The allocation of tradeable emission permits within Federal Systems (or Economic Unions)
No full textOptimal Climate Policy for a Pessimistic Social Planner
Full text linkThis paper characterizes the preferences of a pessimistic social planner concerned with the potential costs of extreme, low-probability climate events. This pessimistic attitude is represented by a recursive optimization criterion à la Hansen and Sargent (IEEE Trans Autom Control 40:968–971, 1995) implying that a very sharp and early mitigation effort arises as the optimal climate policy. We find that for sufficiently high levels of risk-aversion an aggressive mitigation policy is chosen even when the discount factor is low. The dynamics of the optimal mitigation policy displays an inverted policy ramp with a sharp and immediate mitigation effort, followed by a gradual reduction until the pollution stock converges towards its long-run equilibrium. We also observe that the initial sharpness of the mitigation effort requires substantial capture and sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere. We extend our analysis showing that when the social planner observes the concentration and emission levels with a time lag, she undertakes a more aggressive policy to reduce the greater degree of uncertainty she faces. Finally, we show under which conditions the optimal mitigation policy dictated by our analysis coincides with that derived using the robustness approach of Hansen and Sargent (Robustness, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008)
A note on international emissions trading with endogenous allowance choices
No full textIn this note we extend the analysis developed by Helm (2003) and consider an international emissions trading system (ETS) where the initial allocation of tradeable permits may be chosen non cooperatively, as in Helm, or cooperatively. We first derive conditions guaranteeing that polluting firms located in a given country benefit from an increase in the received amount of emission permits; then, we compare the countries' allocation choices under both a non-cooperative (decentralized) and a cooperative (centralized) regime, showing that, both in each country and on aggregate, decentralization leads to a lower environmental quality than the "first best" that would arise under a centralized ETS. As a result, the equilibrium permits price in the latter case is higher than under decentralization. We show that this conclusions do not depend only on the presence of transboundary pollution, but also on the international dimension of emissions trading. Finally, although centralization leads to higher welfare and better environmental quality, we find that some countries might not consent to it and, moreover, we identify cases where consensus on centralization cannot be recovered by simply redistributing permits among countries
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