IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/20999.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Expecting the Unexpected: Emissions Uncertainty and Environmental Market Design

Author

Listed:
  • Severin Borenstein
  • James Bushnell
  • Frank A. Wolak
  • Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins

Abstract

We study potential equilibria in California's cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases (GHGs) based on information available before the market started. We find large ex ante uncertainty in business-as-usual emissions and in the abatement that might result from non-market policies, much larger than the reduction that could plausibly occur in response to an allowance price within a politically acceptable range. This implies that the market price is very likely to be determined by an administrative price floor or ceiling. Similar factors seem likely to be present in other cap-and-trade markets for GHGs.

Suggested Citation

  • Severin Borenstein & James Bushnell & Frank A. Wolak & Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins, 2015. "Expecting the Unexpected: Emissions Uncertainty and Environmental Market Design," NBER Working Papers 20999, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20999
    Note: EEE IO
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20999.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Marion, Justin & Muehlegger, Erich, 2011. "Fuel tax incidence and supply conditions," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(9), pages 1202-1212.
    2. Joseph E. Aldy & Alan J. Krupnick & Richard G. Newell & Ian W. H. Parry & William A. Pizer, 2010. "Designing Climate Mitigation Policy," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(4), pages 903-934, December.
    3. Matthew S. Lewis, 2011. "Asymmetric Price Adjustment and Consumer Search: An Examination of the Retail Gasoline Market," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(2), pages 409-449, June.
    4. Hobbs, Benjamin F. & Bushnell, James & Wolak, Frank A., 2010. "Upstream vs. downstream CO2 trading: A comparison for the electricity context," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(7), pages 3632-3643, July.
    5. Jonathan E. Hughes & Christopher R. Knittel & Daniel Sperling, 2008. "Evidence of a Shift in the Short-Run Price Elasticity of Gasoline Demand," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 29(1), pages 113-134.
    6. Koichiro Ito, 2014. "Do Consumers Respond to Marginal or Average Price? Evidence from Nonlinear Electricity Pricing," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(2), pages 537-563, February.
    7. Meredith Fowlie, 2011. "Updating the Allocation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Permits in a Federal Cap-and-Trade Program," NBER Chapters, in: The Design and Implementation of US Climate Policy, pages 157-171, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Kamerschen, David R. & Porter, David V., 2004. "The demand for residential, industrial and total electricity, 1973-1998," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 87-100, January.
    9. Engle, Robert & Granger, Clive, 2015. "Co-integration and error correction: Representation, estimation, and testing," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 39(3), pages 106-135.
    10. Pizer, William A., 2002. "Combining price and quantity controls to mitigate global climate change," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(3), pages 409-434, September.
    11. Maximilian Auffhammer & Edward Rubin, 2018. "Natural Gas Price Elasticities and Optimal Cost Recovery Under Consumer Heterogeneity: Evidence from 300 million natural gas bills," NBER Working Papers 24295, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Harrison Fell & Dallas Burtraw & Richard Morgenstern & Karen Palmer, 2012. "Climate Policy Design with Correlated Uncertainties in Offset Supply and Abatement Cost," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 88(3), pages 589-611.
    13. Diebold, Francis X & Kilian, Lutz, 2000. "Unit-Root Tests Are Useful for Selecting Forecasting Models," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 18(3), pages 265-273, July.
    14. Holland, Stephen P. & Moore, Michael R., 2013. "Market design in cap and trade programs: Permit validity and compliance timing," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 66(3), pages 671-687.
    15. Johansen, Soren, 1995. "Likelihood-Based Inference in Cointegrated Vector Autoregressive Models," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198774501.
    16. Søren Johansen, 2005. "Interpretation of Cointegrating Coefficients in the Cointegrated Vector Autoregressive Model," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 67(1), pages 93-104, February.
    17. James Archsmith & Kenneth T. Gillingham & Christopher R. Knittel & David S. Rapson, 2020. "Attribute substitution in household vehicle portfolios," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 51(4), pages 1162-1196, December.
    18. Severin Borenstein & A. Colin Cameron & Richard Gilbert, 1997. "Do Gasoline Prices Respond Asymmetrically to Crude Oil Price Changes?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(1), pages 305-339.
    19. Dahl, Carol A., 2012. "Measuring global gasoline and diesel price and income elasticities," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 2-13.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Catherine Hausman, 2019. "Shock Value: Bill Smoothing and Energy Price Pass‐Through," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 67(2), pages 242-278, June.
    2. Ahundjanov, Behzod B. & Noel, Michael D., 2021. "What’s in a name? The incidence of gasoline excise taxes versus gasoline carbon levies," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    3. Jens-Peter Loy & Thore Holm & Carsten Steinhagen & Thomas Glauben, 2015. "Cost pass-through in differentiated product markets: a disaggregated study for milk and butter," European Review of Agricultural Economics, Oxford University Press and the European Agricultural and Applied Economics Publications Foundation, vol. 42(3), pages 441-471.
    4. Matthew Chesnes, 2016. "Asymmetric Pass-Through in U.S. Gasoline Prices," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 1).
    5. Jeyhun I. Mikayilov & Shahriyar Mukhtarov & Hasan Dinçer & Serhat Yüksel & Rıdvan Aydın, 2020. "Elasticity Analysis of Fossil Energy Sources for Sustainable Economies: A Case of Gasoline Consumption in Turkey," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(3), pages 1-15, February.
    6. Noel, Michael D. & Roach, Travis, 2017. "Marginal reductions in vehicle emissions under a dual-blend ethanol mandate: Evidence from a natural experiment," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 45-54.
    7. Kilian, Lutz & Zhou, Xiaoqing, 2024. "Heterogeneity in the pass-through from oil to gasoline prices: A new instrument for estimating the price elasticity of gasoline demand," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 232(C).
    8. Raghoo, Pravesh & Surroop, Dinesh, 2020. "Price and income elasticities of oil demand in Mauritius: An empirical analysis using cointegration method," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 140(C).
    9. Wagatha, Matthias, 2007. "Integration, Kointegration und die Langzeitprognose von Kreditausfallzyklen [Integration, Cointegration and Long-Horizont Forecasting of Credit-Default-Cycles]," MPRA Paper 8602, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Noel, Michael D. & Qiang, Hongjie, 2019. "The role of information in retail gasoline price dispersion," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 173-187.
    11. Mohammad J Alam & Raghbendra Jha, 2016. "Asymmetric threshold vertical price transmission in wheat and flour markets in Dhaka (Bangladesh): seemingly unrelated regression analysis," ASARC Working Papers 2016-03, The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre.
    12. Ederington, Louis H. & Fernando, Chitru S. & Hoelscher, Seth A. & Lee, Thomas K. & Linn, Scott C., 2019. "A review of the evidence on the relation between crude oil prices and petroleum product prices," Journal of Commodity Markets, Elsevier, vol. 13(C), pages 1-15.
    13. Remer, Marc, 2015. "An empirical investigation of the determinants of asymmetric pricing," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 46-56.
    14. Leonid Galchynskyi, 2020. "Estimation of the price elasticity of petroleum products’ consumption in Ukraine," Equilibrium. Quarterly Journal of Economics and Economic Policy, Institute of Economic Research, vol. 15(2), pages 315-339, June.
    15. Muhammad Omer, 2018. "Estimating Elasticity of Transport Fuel Demand in Pakistan," SBP Working Paper Series 96, State Bank of Pakistan, Research Department.
    16. Chesnes, Matthew, 2015. "The impact of outages on prices and investment in the U.S. oil refining industry," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 324-336.
    17. Emerson Fernandes Marçal & Priscila Fernandes Ribeiro, 2011. "Levado pelos Fundamentos? Estimando o Desalinhamento Cambial Norte-Americano a partir de Técnicas de Cointegração," Discussion Papers 1674, Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada - IPEA.
    18. Palencia-González, Francisco J. & Navío-Marco, Julio & Juberías-Cáceres, Gema, 2020. "Analysis of brand influence in the rockets and feathers effect using disaggregated data," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    19. Campbell, Alrick, 2018. "Price and income elasticities of electricity demand: Evidence from Jamaica," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 19-32.
    20. Rahman, Mohammad Chhiddikur, 2020. "Welfare Impact of Asymmetric Price Transmission on Bangladesh Rice Consumers," EconStor Theses, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 242248, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • Q5 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics
    • Q52 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Pollution Control Adoption and Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects
    • 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:20999. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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.