Reports & Papers

The author of this discussion paper examines the choice between — and design of — CO₂ cap-and-trade and tax policies through a political-economy lens. A Harvard Project event at COP-23 will draw upon this paper.

Authors Christoph Böhringer and Thomas Rutherford evaluate the efficacy of imposing carbon tariffs on U.S. imports as an alternative to U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement. The authors warn that carbon tariffs on the United States could lead to a tariff war that ultimately hurts China, in particular, and the European Union more than the United States.

The authors summarize the past thirty years of cap-and-trade programs throughout the world and explore future applications of market-based approaches to reducing emissions.

The authors examine the effect of real energy prices and a simulated carbon price on production and net imports. They find modest adverse competitiveness effects for energy-intensive industries.

The authors explore several approaches to an ambitious climate agreement in Paris in late 2015—including through carbon pricing.

This discussion paper explores the potential adverse impacts of unilateral climate policies on domestic energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries.

The authors evaluate the consistency of economic incentives and climate objectives in Europe, with regard to energy markets. In this context, they examine policy interactions between the EU-ETS and Europe's renewable target—and the role of natural gas in a transition to a low-carbon economy.

The authors draw upon the past decade of experience with carbon markets to test a series of hypotheses about why governments have demonstrated a preference for linking.

"A successful international climate policy framework will have to meet two conditions, build a coalition of countries that is potentially effective and give each member country sufficient incentives to join and remain in this coalition. Such coalition should be capable of delivering ambitious emission reduction even if some countries do not take mitigation action. In addition, it should meet the target without exceedingly high mitigation costs and deliver a net benefit to member countries as a whole. The novel contribution of this paper is mostly methodological, but it also adds a better qualification of well-known results that are policy relevant."