IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/16305.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Economics of Carbon Offsets

Author

Listed:
  • James B. Bushnell

Abstract

Although international programs for carbon offsets play an important role in current and prospective climate-change policy, they continue to be very controversial. Asymmetric information creates several incentive problems, include adverse selection and moral hazard, in offset markets. The current regulatory focus on additionality tends to paint all these problems with a broad brush without proper consideration of the context or their implications.

Suggested Citation

  • James B. Bushnell, 2010. "The Economics of Carbon Offsets," NBER Working Papers 16305, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:16305
    Note: EEE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16305.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hilary Sigman, 2011. "Monitoring and Enforcement of Climate Policy," NBER Chapters, in: The Design and Implementation of US Climate Policy, pages 213-225, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. He, Gang & Morse, Richard, 2013. "Addressing carbon Offsetters’ Paradox: Lessons from Chinese wind CDM," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 1051-1055.
    3. Hilary Sigman & Howard F. Chang, 2011. "The Effect of Allowing Pollution Offsets with Imperfect Enforcement," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(3), pages 268-272, May.
    4. Yallwe, Hagos Alem & Buscemi, Antonino, 2011. "It is time to re-think on environment, energy and economics (E3)," MPRA Paper 32216, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Daniel C. Matisoff & Douglas S. Noonan & John J. O'Brien, 2013. "Convergence in Environmental Reporting: Assessing the Carbon Disclosure Project," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(5), pages 285-305, July.
    6. van Benthem, Arthur & Kerr, Suzi, 2013. "Scale and transfers in international emissions offset programs," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 31-46.
    7. Rachel Glennerster & Seema Jayachandran, 2023. "Think Globally, Act Globally: Opportunities to Mitigate Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 37(3), pages 111-136, Summer.
    8. Jimena González-Ramírez & Catherine L. Kling & Adriana Valcu, 2012. "An Overview of Carbon Offsets from Agriculture," Annual Review of Resource Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 4(1), pages 145-160, August.
    9. Boyce, James K., 2018. "Carbon Pricing: Effectiveness and Equity," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 150(C), pages 52-61.
    10. Heather Klemick, 2012. "What is the Optimal Offsets Discount under a Second-Best Cap & Trade Policy?," NCEE Working Paper Series 201204, National Center for Environmental Economics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, revised Jul 2012.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
    • L14 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Transactional Relationships; Contracts and Reputation
    • L5 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:16305. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.