Resource and Energy Economics最新文献

Despite ambitious climate goals and already substantial stocks of developed fossil energy reserves, development of new fossil energy reserves continues to be high. This raises concerns, as it reinforces the fossil industry’s opportunities and incentives to continue extraction, and may necessitate abandonment of developed fossil reserves to meet climate targets. In this paper, we analyze the energy transition, considering fossil development activities. We provide conditions for when the fossil industry will abandon reserves, and establish that continued development of fossil resources is not incompatible with abandoning developed reserves. The first-best implementation of a carbon budget involves reserve abandonment, and thus development that pushes developed reserves in excess of the remaining budget. A quantitative assessment reveals that a volume equal to 9–19% of current oil and gas reserves are optimally abandoned, and that, even under a 1.5^∘C warming target, development of new reserves is justified for another decade.

Efficient water management in agricultural activities can improve local water resource conditions while enhancing farms’ economic performance. This paper analyses how farmers’ decisions to adopt innovative and sustainable irrigation systems, such as Water Conservation and Saving Technologies (WCSTs), would shape Italian farms’ economic resilience by improving land productivity. Using a Panel Endogenous Switching Regression Model, our results confirm that the WCST adoption is an endogenous and self-selective process and land value is endogenously determined. Seasonal aridity indices are important factors in the choice of WCST adoption, with different effects on non-adopters and adopters. Farmers who adopt WCSTs are more productive than those who do not.

We compare two regulatory structures in the application of emission standards and a subsidy scheme in the automobile market. The regulator can either commit to an emission standard or is not able to commit. Firms compete á la Cournot and produce fuel-powered and electric vehicles. The emissions of fuel-powered vehicles can be abated by means of investing in emission-reducing innovation. Our results indicate that under commitment there are less emissions, higher subsidies and a major adoption of electric vehicles. By contrast, non-commitment yields more fuel-powered vehicles, more vehicles in total and higher consumer surplus. Electric vehicle producers obtain higher profits under commitment, whereas fuel-powered vehicle producers might be better off under both regulatory structures. Social welfare is higher under non-commitment as long as environmental damages are regarded severe. Otherwise, commitment is socially preferable. This result provides an explanation for observed differences in the duration of environmental standards between the US, the EU and China.

We establish two investment rules for maximal constant per capita consumption under exogenous population growth, one in terms of total capital stocks and the other in terms of per capita capital stocks. Both rules show the importance of the development of future population growth. The investment rules are illustrated in the one-sector model of capital accumulation, the DHSS model of capital accumulation and resource depletion, and the Stollery–d’Autume–Schubert model in which natural capital provides amenities. Application to recent empirical evidence indicates that actual genuine savings might be insufficient to sustain per capita consumption, when future population growth is combined with a large per capita consumption-wage gap.

We establish a two-sector model to simulate the potential effects of green fiscal poli- cies and unconventional green monetary policy on the economy during a recovery or in case of a stimulus policy. We find that instruments such as a carbon tax, an implicit tax on brown loans, and a subsidy for the purchase of green goods are all beneficial to the green sector, in contrast to green quantitative easing. A carbon tax imposed directly on firms in the brown sector is the most effective tool to reduce pollution. More importantly, the marginal effects of green instruments on the economy depend on consumer preferences. Namely, the marginal effects are the most prominent when consumers start to purchase more green goods as an increasing part of their consumption basket. Furthermore, the effects of those green policies are more effective when the elasticity of substitution between green and brown goods increases. This finding suggests that raising consumers’ awareness and ability to consume green goods reinforce the effectiveness of public policies designed for low-carbon transition of the economy.

Many sectors of the economy that are targets of emissions reduction policy exhibit price-responsive demand, long-lived capital, capacity constraints, and foresighted decision-making. I explore how these features affect the efficiency and dynamics of tradable performance standards (TPS) using analytical and numerical equilibrium models. While I show these dynamic considerations alone do not lead to conflicts with existing theory on the overall efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the TPS relative to a first-best policy, they do affect the transition path and steady state. Most notably, under all but the smallest discount rates, the TPS can lead to a more cost-effective post-transition steady state than the equivalent emissions cap. Given the intergenerational transition that comes with decarbonization, this result suggests some classes of present and future consumers may prefer a TPS to an emissions cap.

We develop the classic market-level, age-structured forest model by extending the description of forestry output from homogenous wood to a set of differentiated outputs such as sawlogs and biofuels. The extension changes several most established results on the long-run sustainable market equilibrium of forestry. We show the existence of an optimal steady state with two (or more) simultaneous rotation periods. This equilibrium yields a smooth timber flow without normal forest structure and thus deviates from existing normal forest results as well as results on equilibrium cycles. We further show that the optimal rotation structure depends on wood product demand and the demand for land outside forestry, another feature that is absent in previous model formulations.

Most developed countries will be facing severe public budget constraints. We examine how extraction or use of nonrenewable resources should be taxed when governments need to collect commodity tax revenues. Moreover, we show how our results can be directly used to indicate how carbon taxation of nonrenewable energy sources should be increased in the presence of public-revenue needs. The obtained tax formula is an augmented, dynamic version of the standard Ramsey taxation rule. It distorts developed reserves, which are reduced, and their depletion, which is slowed down, going further in the direction prescribed for the resolution of the climate externality. We present a simple calibrated application of our results to illustrate how carbon taxation of oil should be strongly augmented, and the incidence of this adjustment on oil use and tax revenues.

Understanding when and where face-to-face communication affects pro-environmental decisions is important for policymakers. We study a data set collected in a solicitation project intended to increase participation in a community-financed waste collection program in Indonesia. Two types of messages are developed and randomly assigned to 748 households. In addition, solicitors are randomly assigned to a control group or one of two treatment groups, and these groups are shuffled further midway through the project. These two orthogonal randomizations allow us to assess the impact of a combination of messages, solicitors and households. We find that the “help the children” message increases the probability of participation for households with a young child. Solicitor personality is associated with immediate participation but becomes nonsignificant after three months. Furthermore, a household is more likely to participate if a solicitor knows the respondent personally. These results suggest that, at least in the short term, important factors in encouraging behavioral changes include not only the contents of messages but also the type of sender of such messages. This paper highlights the possible impact of targeting and content-sender-receiver matching when persuasive communication is used as an environmental policy instrument.