Tightening climate policies in some countries brings about a need to toughen them others. More stringent requirements for national producers of carbon-intensive products within one country, example, the form increased coverage or level domestic carbon price, stimulates partial replacement production with foreign analogs from countrieswith relatively looser greenhouse gas emissions regulation. T...

A comparative assessment of market-based climate policy instruments –carbon tax vs. ETS– for emission reduction in the Mexican electricity sector is presented. Model-based scenarios of different tax and cap levels were simulated on an existing Balmorel partial equilibrium model populated with data from the Mexican electricity system. The simulation results served to compare the performance of b...

Climate change, especially global warming caused by human activities presents serious global risks. Mitigating global warming by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a unique challenge facing our generation. In order to tackle this challenge, many measures are being developed, among which carbon trading is a popular one. In this paper, a new paradigm for the design of water distribution s...

In this note we show that the results developed in Singh and Vives (1984) are sensitive to the duopoly assumption (Rand Journal of Economics 15, 546-554). If there are more than two firms, prices may be higher under price competition than under quantity competition. This will be the case if quality differences are large and goods are complements. If goods are substitutes, high-quality firms may...

ELECTIONS AND ASSET PRICING: THE POLITICALLY SENSITIVE EQUITY OF US MILITARY CONTRACTORS by

This article measures the extent to which prices exceed marginal costs in the U.S. natural gas distribution market during the period 1991-2007. We find large departures from marginal cost pricing in all 50 states, with residential and commercial customers facing average markups of over 40%. Based on conservative estimates of the price elasticity of demand these distortions impose hundreds of mi...

In contrast with the classical models of frictionless financial markets, market models with proportional transaction costs, even satisfying usual no-arbitrage properties, may admit arbitrage opportunities of the second kind. This means that there are self-financing portfolios with initial endowments laying outside the solvency region but ending inside. Such a phenomenon was discovered by M. Rás...

Focus is here on coalitional games among economic agents plagued by aggregate pollutions of diverse sorts. Defecting players presumably pollute more than others. Then, granted convex preferences and technologies, the core is proven nonempty. In fact, under natural assumptions, a specific, computable core solution comes in terms of shadow prices on the said aggregates. Such prices may, in large ...

For portfolio choice problems with proportional transaction costs, we discuss whether or not there exists a shadow price, i.e., a least favorable frictionless market extension leading to the same optimal strategy and utility. By means of an explicit counter-example, we show that shadow prices may fail to exist even in seemingly perfectly benign situations, i.e., for a log-investor trading in an...