Many cities worldwide have considered vehicle restriction policies to curb proliferating problems related to traffic and pollution.

At the beginning of 2011, Beijing became the first city to allocate vehicle license plates using a lottery. We provide a background on Beijing׳s lottery and analyze its short-term effects. We find that growth in new vehicle registrations has been sharply curtailed. However, this policy may not reduce fuel consumption as much as expected.

Access related discussion paper here.

Top-down climate negotiations embodied by the Kyoto Protocol have all but stalled, chiefly because of disagreements over targets and objections to financial transfers. To avoid those problems, many have shifted their focus to linkage of bottom-up climate policies such as regional carbon markets.

A driving restriction policy, as one of the control-and-command rationing measures, is a politically acceptable policy tool to address traffic congestion and air pollution in some countries and cities in the world. Beijing is the first city in China to implement this policy.

This paper studies how different NOx abatement technologies have diffused under the Swedish system of refunded emissions charges and analyzes the determinants of the time to adoption. The policy, under which the charge revenues are refunded back to the regulated firms in proportion to energy output, was explicitly designed to affect investment in NOx reducing technologies.

Voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated between environmental regulators and polluters are increasingly popular in developing countries. According to proponents, they can sidestep weak institutions and other pervasive barriers to conventional mandatory regulation in such countries. Yet little is known about the drivers of their use and their effectiveness in poor countries. The considerable literature on voluntary initiatives in industrialized countries, where both VAs and socioeconomic conditions differ, may not apply.

Many cities worldwide have considered vehicle restriction policies to curb proliferating problems of traffic and pollution.

At the beginning of 2011, Beijing became the first city to allocate vehicle license plates using a lottery. We provide background on Beijing’s lottery, and analyze its short-term effects. We find that vehicle growth has been sharply curtailed, and congestion has been reduced.  However, this policy may not reduce fuel consumption as much as expected.

This disucssion paper has been peer-reviewed. Access it here.

We study the design of an economic incentive based program – a subsidy – to induce adoption of more efficient technology in a pollution reduction program in southern Chile. Stated preferences methods, contingent valuation (CV), and choice experiment (CE) are used to estimate the probability of adoption and the willingness to share the cost of a new technology by a household. The cost-effectiveness property of different subsidy schemes is explored numerically for different regulatory objectives.

A driving restriction policy, as a control-and-command rationing measure, is a politically acceptable policy tool to address traffic congestion and air pollution in some countries and cities. Beijing was the first city in China to implement this policy. A one-day-a-week driving restriction scheme was expected to take 20 percent of cars off the road every weekday.

We examine the choice of policy instruments (price, quantity or a mix of the two) when two pollutants are regulated and firms’ abatement costs are private information.

Whether abatement efforts are complements or substitutes is key determining the choice of policies. When pollutants are complements, a mixed policy instrument with a tax on one pollutant and a quota on another is sometimes preferable even if the pollutants are identical in terms of benefits and costs of abatement. Yet, if they are substitutes, the mixed policy is dominated by taxes or quotas.