NBER Working Papers by Nicholas Muller

Much of the air pollution currently regulated under U.S. emissions trading programs is non-uniformly mixed, meaning that health and environmental damages depend on the location and dispersion characteristics of the sources. Existing policy regimes ignore this fact. Emissions are penalized at a single permit price, regardless of the location of the source. In theory, differentiated policies can be designed to accommodate non-uniformly mixed pollution using emissions penalties that vary with emissions damages. Under perfect certainty, damage-based policy differentiation is unambiguously welfare improving. In the presence of uncertainty about damages and abatement costs, differentiated policies need not welfare dominate simpler, undifferentiated designs. Using rich data from a major U.S. emis...