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This volume presents six new papers on environmental/energy economics and policy. Robert Stavins evaluates carbon taxes versus a cap-and-trade mechanism for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, arguing that specific design features of either instrument can be more consequential than the choice of instrument itself. Lucas Davis and James Sallee show that the exemption of electric vehicles from the gasoline tax is likely to be efficient as long as gasoline prices remain below social marginal costs, even though it results in lower tax revenue. Caroline Flammer analyzes the rapidly growing market for green bonds and highlights the importance of third-party certification to  the financial and environmental performance of publically traded companies. Antonio Bento, Mark Jacobsen, Christopher Knittel, and Arthur van Benthem develop a general framework for evaluating the costs and benefits of fuel economy standards and use it to account for the differences between several recent studies of changes in these standards.  Nicholas Muller estimates a measure of output in the U.S. economy over the last 60 years that accounts for air pollution damages, and shows  that pollution effects are sizable, affect growth rates, and have diminished appreciably over time. Finally, Marc Hafstead and Roberton Williams illustrate methods of accounting for  employment effects  when evaluating the costs and benefits of environmental regulations.   

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and related policy issues. Robert Pindyck provides a systematic overview of what is known, and remains unknown, about climate change, along with the implications of uncertainty for climate policy. Shaikh Eskander, Sam Fankhauser, and Joana Setzer offer insights from a comprehensive data set on climate change legislation and litigation across all countries of the world over the past thirty years. Adele Morris, Noah Kaufman, and Siddhi Doshi shine a light on how expected trends in the coal industry will create significant challenges for the local public finance of coal-reliant communities. Joseph Aldy and his collaborators analyze the treatment of co-benefits in benefit-cost analyses of federal clean air regulations. Tatyana Deryugina and her co-authors report on the geographic and socioeconomic heterogeneity in the benefits of reducing particulate matter air pollution. Finally, Oliver Browne, Ludovica Gazze, and Michael Greenstone use detailed data on residential water consumption to evaluate the relative impacts of conservation policies based on prices, restrictions, and public persuasion.

Rigorous, careful, and nonpartisan research with a high policy impact on environmental and energy economics.

Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy focuses on the effective and efficient management of environmental and energy challenges. Research papers offer new evidence on the intended and unintended consequences, the market and nonmarket effects, and the incentive and distributional impacts of policy initiatives and market developments.

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy. Judson Boomhower and Meredith Fowlie illustrate the distributional consequences of improving risk pricing efficiency in wildfire insurance markets. Claire Brunel and Arik Levinson develop a conceptual framework for understanding the economic and environmental consequences of taxes on imports of goods based on their carbon content. Karen Clay, Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Akshaya Jha, Joshua Lewis, Noah Miller, and Edson Severnini study the long-run distributional implications of US power plant sitings over more than a century. Todd Gerarden, Mar Reguant, and Daniel Xu provide a comprehensive overview of industrial policy in the renewable energy sector, with comparisons across the US, EU, and China. Jamie Hansen-Lewis and Michelle Marcus show how failure to account for behavioral responses can affect policy predictions regarding maritime emissions. Finally, Richard Sweeney and Joseph Wilske estimate the externalities associated with correlated intermittency in electricity generation from US wind power investments.