Robert N. Stavins

August 1994

"Environment Regulation and the Competitiveness of U.S. Manufacturing"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

There is a heated debated among policy makers about the relationship between domestic environmental regulation and international competitiveness. The conventional wisdom among economists is that environmental regulations impose significant costs, slow productivity growth, and thereby hinder the ability of U.S. firms to compete in international markets. Under a more recent, revisionist view, environmental regulations are seen as being not only benign in their impacts on international competitiveness, but actually a net positive force driving private firms and the economy as a whole to become more efficient and competitive in international markets.

August, 1993

"Regulatory Review of Environmental Policy: The Potential Role of Health-Health Analysis"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

May, 1993

"Transaction Costs and the Performance of Markets for Pollution Control"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

March, 1992

"Greening of America's Taxes: Pollution Charges and Environmental Protection"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

December, 1991

"Economic Incentives for Environmental Protection: Integrating Theory and Practice"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

February 15, 1991

Evaluating the Relative Effectiveness of Economic Incentives and Direct Regulation for Environmental Protection: Impacts on the Diffusion of Technology

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

July, 1989

"Alternative Renewable Resources Strategies: A Simulation of Optimal Use"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

"Energy-Efficient Technologies and Climate Change Policies: Issues and Evidence"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

Enhanced energy efficiency occupies a central role in evaluating the efficacy and cost of climate change policies. Ultimately, total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the product of population, economic activity per capita, energy use per unit of economic activity, and the carbon intensity of energy used. Although greenhouse gas emissions can be limited by reducing economic activity, this option obviously has little appeal even to rich countries, let alone poor ones. Much attention has therefore been placed on the role that technological improvements can play in reducing carbon emissions and in lowering the cost of those reductions. In addition, the influence of technological changes on the emission, concentration, and cost of reducing GHGs will tend to overwhelm other factors, especially in the longer term. Understanding the process of technological change is therefore of utmost importance. Nonetheless, the task of measuring, modeling, and ultimately influencing the path of technological development is fraught with complexity and uncertainty - as are the technologies themselves.

"Experience with Market-Based Environmental Policy Instruments"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

Environmental policies typically combine the identification of a goal with some means to achieve that goal. This paper, prepared as a chapter draft of the forthcoming Handbook of Environmental Economics, focuses exclusively on the second component, the means -- the "instruments" -- of environmental policy, and considers, in particular, experience around the world with the relatively new breed of economic-incentive or market-based policy instrumens. The author defines these instruments broadly, and considers them within four categories: pollution charges, tradable permits; market barrier reductions; and government subsidy reductions. By defining market-based instruments broadly, the author casts a large net for this review of applications. As a consequence, the review is extensvie. But this should not leave the impression that market-baseed instruments have replaced, or have come anywhere close to replacing, the conventional, command-and-control approach to environmental protection. Further, even when and where these approaches have been used in their purest form and with some success, such as in the case of tradeable permit systems int he United States, they have not always performed as anticipated. In the final part of the paper, the author asks what lessons can be learned from our experiences. In particular, the paper considers normative lessons for: design and implementation; analysis of prospective and adopted systems; and identification of new applications.

"Effects of Potential Land Development on Agricultural Land Prices"

Discussion Paper

By Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Member of the Board; Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

We conduct a national-scale study of the determinants of agricultural land values to better understand how current farmland prices are influenced by the potential for future land development. The theoretical basis for the empirical analysis is a spatial city model with stochastic returns to future land development. From the theoretical model, we derive an expression for the current price of agricultural land in terms of annual returns to agricultural production, the price of recently developed land parcels, and expressions involving model parameters that are represented in the empirical model by nonlinear functions of observed variables and parameters to be estimated.