Category: Environmental Economics

Remembering Ronald Coase’s Contributions

On September 2nd, Ronald Coase, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago Law School, Nobel laureate, and principal creator of the academic field of law and economics, passed away at the age of 102.  Numerous, lengthy obituaries have appeared in the national and international press.  And in an effective essay posted at the Energy Economics Exchange web site, Severin Borenstein, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote about the effect that Coase’s thinking had decades ago on his own intellectual development (while lamenting that the Wall Street Journal in its own tribute to Coase had twisted the implications of his work to fit the Journal’s view of the world).

The passing of Professor Coase brings to mind an essay I wrote for this blog in July of 2012, in which I recalled that a group of economists and legal scholars had gathered in December, 2010, at the University of Chicago to celebrate two notable events.  One was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost” (Coase 1960).  The other was Professor Coase’s 100th birthday.  The conference resulted in a special issue of The Journal of Law and Economics.

Robert Hahn (of the University of Oxford) and I were privileged to participate in the conference (a video of our presentation is available here).  We recognized that the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Coase’s landmark study provided an opportunity for us to examine one of that study’s key implications, which is of great importance not only for economics but for public policy as well, in particular, for environmental policy.

The Coase Theorem and the Independence Property

In our article, “The Effect of Allowance Allocations on Cap-and-Trade System Performance,” Hahn and I took as our starting point a well-known result from Coase’s work, namely, that bilateral negotiation between the generator and the recipient of an externality will lead to the same efficient outcome regardless of the initial assignment of property rights, in the absence of transaction costs, income effects, and third party impacts. This result, or a variation of it, has come to be known as the Coase Theorem.

We focused on an idea that is closely related to the Coase theorem, namely, that the market equilibrium in a cap-and-trade system will be cost-effective and independent of the initial allocation of tradable rights (typically referred to as permits or allowances). That is, the overall cost of achieving a given emission reduction will be minimized, and the final allocation of permits will be independent of the initial allocation, under certain conditions (conditional upon the permits being allocated freely, i.e., not auctioned). We called this the independence property. It is closely related to a core principle of general equilibrium theory (Arrow and Debreu 1954), namely, that when markets are complete, outcomes remain efficient even after lump-sum transfers among agents.

The Practical Political Importance of the Independence Property

We were interested in the independence property because of its great political importance.  The reason why this property is of such great relevance to the practical development of public policy is that it allows equity and efficiency concerns to be separated. In particular, a government can set an overall cap of pollutant emissions (a pollution reduction goal) and leave it up to a legislature to construct a constituency in support of the program by allocating shares of the allowances to various interests, such as sectors and geographic regions, without affecting either the environmental performance of the system or its aggregate social costs.  Indeed, this property is a key reason why cap-and-trade systems have been employed and have evolved as the preferred instrument in a variety of environmental policy settings.

In Theory, Does the Property Always Hold?

Because of the importance of this property, we examined the conditions under which it is more or less likely to hold — both in theory and in practice.  In short, we found that in theory, a number of factors can lead to the independence property being violated. These are particular types of transaction costs in cap-and-trade markets; significant market power in the allowance market; uncertainty regarding the future price of allowances; conditional allowance allocations, such as output-based updating-allocation mechanisms; non-cost-minimizing behavior by firms; and specific kinds of regulatory treatment of participants in a cap-and-trade market.

In Reality, Has the Property Held?

Of course, the fact that these factors can lead to the violation of the independence property does not mean that in practice they do so in quantitatively significant ways.  Therefore, Hahn and I also carried out an empirical assessment of the independence property in past and current cap-and-trade systems: lead trading; chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the Montreal Protocol; the sulfur dioxide (SO2) allowance trading program; the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM) in Southern California; eastern nitrogen oxides (NOX) markets; the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS); and Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol.

I hope some of may find time to read our article, but a quick summary of our assessment is that we found modest support for the independence property in the seven cases we examined (but also recognized that it would surely be useful to have more empirical research in this realm).

Political Judgments

That the independence property appears to be broadly validated provides support for the efficacy of past political judgments regarding constituency building through legislatures’ allowance allocations in cap-and-trade systems. Governments have repeatedly set the overall emissions cap and then left it up to the political process to allocate the available number of allowances among sources to build support for an initiative without reducing the system’s environmental performance or driving up its cost.

This success with environmental cap-and-trade systems should be contrasted with many other public policy proposals for which the normal course of events is that the political bargaining that is necessary to develop support reduces the effectiveness of the policy or drives up its overall cost.  So, the independence property of well-designed and implemented cap-and-trade systems is hardly something to be taken for granted.  It is of real political importance and remarkable social value.  It is just one of many lasting contributions of Ronald Coase.

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Economics and Politics in California: Cap-and-Trade Allowance Allocation and Trade Exposure

In my previous essay at this blog – The Importance of Getting it Right in California – I wrote about the precedents and lessons that  California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) and its greenhouse gas (GHG) cap-and-trade system will have for other jurisdictions around the world, including other states, provinces, countries, and regions.  This is particularly important, given the failure of the U.S. Senate in 2009 to pass companion legislation to the Waxman-Markey bill, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, highlighting the absence of a national, economy-wide carbon pricing policy.

In my previous essay, I focused on three pending design issues in the emerging rules for the AB-32 cap-and-trade system:  (1) the GHG allowance reserve; (2) the role of offsets; and (3) proposals for allowance holding limits.  I drew upon a presentation I made on “Offsets, Holding Limits, and Market Liquidity (and Other Factors Affecting Market Performance)” at the 2013 Summer Issues Seminar of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance.

At the same conference, I made another presentation, which was on “Allowance Value Distribution and Trade Exposure,” a topic that is of great importance both economically and politically, not only in the context of the design of California’s AB-32 cap-and-trade system, but for the design of any cap-and-trade instrument in any jurisdiction.  It is to that topic that I turn today.  (For a much more detailed discussion, please see a white paper I wrote with Dr. Todd Schatzki of Analysis Group, “Using the Value of Allowances from California’s GHG Cap-and-Trade System,” August, 2012).

Why Does Anyone Care About the Allowance Value Distribution?

A cap-and-trade policy creates a valuable new commodity – emissions allowances.  In a well-functioning emissions trading market, the financial value of these allowances (per ton of emissions, for example) is approximately equivalent to their opportunity cost, which is the marginal cost of emissions reductions.  This is because of the existence of the overall cap, which – if binding – fosters scarcity of available allowances, and hence generates their economic value.

It should not be surprising, then, that the initial allocation of these allowances can have important consequences both for environmental and for economic outcomes.

Environmental Consequences of the Initial Allowance Allocation

No matter how many times I meet with policy makers around the world to talk about alternative policy instruments (for climate change and other environmental problems), I never cease to be struck by the confusion that abounds regarding the environmental (and the economic) consequences of the initial allocation of allowances in a cap-and-trade system.  As I have written many times in the past at this blog, the initial allocation does not directly affect environmental outcomes.  Regardless of the allocation method used, aggregate emissions are limited by the emissions cap.  This is true whether the allowances are sold (auctioned) or distributed without charge.  Furthermore, which firms or sources receive the initial allocation of allowances has no effect on either aggregate emissions or the ultimate distribution of emissions reductions among sources.

This independence of a cap-and-trade system’s performance from the initial allowance allocation was established as far back as 1972 by David Montgomery in a path-breaking article in the Journal of Economic Theory (based upon his 1971 Harvard economics Ph.D. dissertation). It has been validated with empirical evidence repeatedly over the years.  (More below about the initial allocation’s potential effects on economic performance.)

However, it is also true that the initial allocation method can indirectly affect emissions.  In particular, emissions leakage can arise if economic activity shifts to unregulated sources – this risk is greatest with auctions or free fixed allocations.  In contrast, an updating, output-based allocation (used in AB 32 for “industry assistance”) can reduce leakage risk by making the free allocation of allowances marginal, rather than infra-marginal (as is the case with a simple free allocation).

Economic Consequences of the Initial Allowance Allocation

A favorite topic of academic economists is that the allowance allocation method in a cap-and-trade system can affect the overall social cost of the policy if the allowances are auctioned (sold by government to compliance entities), and if the revenues are then used to reduce distortionary taxes (such as taxes on labor and investment), thereby eliminating some deadweight loss and cutting overall social cost.  I discuss this a bit more below, but for now let’s recognize that the combination of two California propositions and subsequent court rulings means that the State is not permitted to use the auction proceeds to cut taxes (rather, any auction proceeds must be used to achieve the purposes of AB 32, that is, reducing GHG emissions).

So, within the set of feasible options, the initial allowance allocation will not directly affect the cost-effectiveness of actions taken by emission sources to reduce emissions.  In other words, aggregate abatement costs will not be directly affected by the nature of the initial allocation.

I was careful to use the word, “directly,” because the initial allowance allocation can indirectly affect economic outcomes.  In particular, the use of updating, output-based allocations can:  (1) lower the costs seen by consumers, which can reduce incentives to conserve; (2) avoid reductions in economic activity within California, with associated distributional impacts; and (3) avoid potential shifts of production to less efficient, more distant producers.

Auction Revenue Use

Decisions about how auction revenues are used can have profound consequences for the potential benefits of auctioning.  There are three basic options.

First, as I emphasized above, in theory, reducing distortionary taxes provides the greatest net economic benefit (by reducing the social cost of the policy).  But California’s unique legal context takes this option off the table.

Second, funding programs to address other market failures that are not addressed by the price signals provided by the cap-and-trade system can be meritorious.   For example, information spillovers can be addressed through financing of research and development activities, and the principal-agent problems that infect energy-efficiency adoption decisions in rental properties can be addressed — to some degree — through zoning and other local policies.

The third and final option, however, is highly problematic, if not completely without merit, and yet, ironically, there are strong incentives in place for policy makers to go this third route.  This third option is to use auction revenues to fund programs to subsidize emission reductions.  There is a strong incentive to do this, because of California’s legal constraint to employ any auction revenues in pursuit of the objectives of the statute, that is, reducing GHG emissions.

What’s the problem?  The AB-32 cap-and-trade system will cover approximately 85% of the economy.  In other words, the vast majority of sources are under the cap.  As I have explained in detail in several previous essays at this blog, under the umbrella of a cap-and-trade mechanism, (successful) efforts to further reduce emissions of capped sources will have three consequences:  (1) allowance prices will be supressed (take a look at the hand-wringing in Europe over allowance prices in its CO2 Emissions Trading System); (2) aggregate compliance costs will be increased (cost-effectiveness is reduced because marginal abatement costs are no longer equated among all sources); and (3) nothing is accomplished for the environment, in the sense that there are no additional CO2 emissions reductions (rather, the CO2 emissions reductions are simply relocated among sources under the cap).

Economics, Policy, and Politics

As I concluded in my previous essay, the California Air Resources Board has done an impressive job in its initial design of the rules for its GHG cap-and-trade system.  Of course, there are flaws, and therefore there are areas for improvement. A major issue continues to be the mechanisms used for the initial allocation of allowances.  Because of the economics and politics of this issue, it will not go away.  But, going forward, it would be helpful if those debating this issue could demonstrate better understanding of the allowance allocation’s real – as opposed to fictitious – environmental and economic consequences.

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The Importance of Getting it Right in California

Why should sub-national climate policies exist?  In the case  of California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), the answer flows directly from the very nature of the problem — global climate change, the ultimate global commons problem.

The Standard Theory

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) uniformly mix in the atmosphere.  Therefore, any jurisdiction taking action — whether a nation, a state, or a city — will incur the costs of its actions, but the benefits of its actions (reduced risk of climate change damages) will be distributed globally.  Hence, for virtually any jurisdiction, the benefits it reaps from its climate‑policy actions will be less than the cost it incurs.  This is despite the fact that the global benefits of action may well be greater — possibly much greater — than global costs.

This presents a classic free-rider problem, in which it is in the interest of each jurisdiction to wait for others to take action, and benefit from their actions (that is, free-ride).  This is the fundamental reason why the highest levels of effective government should be involved, that is, sovereign states (nations).  And this is why international, if not global, cooperation is essential. [See the extensive work in this area of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.]

What’s Missing?

Despite this fundamental reality, there can still be a valuable role for sub-national climate policies, as I wrote about in an essay at this blog in 2010 (which drew, in part, on work I did with Professor Lawrence Goulder of Stanford University).  This is particularly true when appropriate national policies fail to materialize.  The failure of the U.S. Senate to pass companion legislation to the Waxman-Markey bill, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June, 2009, highlighted the absence of a national, economy-wide carbon pricing policy.

Recently, another argument has arisen for the importance of California’s climate policy, namely its potential precedent and lessons for other jurisdictions around the world, including other states, provinces, countries, and regions.

The Importance of Getting the Design Right

Getting the design right of AB 32’s cap-and-trade system is particularly important, because the performance of the system will receive great attention from other jurisdictions around the world considering their own climate policies (as I argued recently at the 2013 Summer Issues Seminar of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance).  In fact, from conversations I’ve had with government officials and others in many parts of the world, it’s clear that the performance of the AB 32 suite of policies, including its centerpiece – a GHG cap-and-trade system – is being very closely watched.  The outcome of California’s program will affect the likelihood of future commitments being made by other jurisdictions beyond California, as well as the ambition of those commitments.  And the system’s design and performance will have significant effects on design decisions in other states, provinces, countries, and regions.

Getting the Design Right

Current allowance prices, which are near the auction reserve (floor) price, should not diminish attention to getting the design details right.  Market conditions could change, leading to price increases, in which case the details of design will affect environmental performance and economic consequences.  Consideration of potential market rule changes to refine the program is prudent.  It would be a mistake to wait until it’s necessary to make ad hoc decisions in a time of crisis.  Three issues stand out (as I wrote recently in much more detail in a white paper with Dr. Todd Schatzki of Analysis Group, “Three Lingering Design Issues Affecting Market Performance in California’s GHG Cap-and-Trade Program”).

Issue 1:  The GHG Allowance Reserve

A recent, credible study by University of California economist, Severin Borenstein, and colleagues suggests that allowances prices in the AB 32 cap-and-trade system are likely to remain relatively low over the remainder of this decade, and that the probability is small of triggering and exhausting the system’s allowance reserve, which is intended to moderate prices.  Nevertheless, the possibility remains that as a result of unanticipated changes in the market (such as higher than anticipated economic growth in California, slower diffusion than anticipated of low-cost abatement technologies, etc.), the current reserve structure could lead to excessively high allowance prices if the reserve is exhausted.  Establishing a mechanism now to avoid this potential future outcome is important to avoid ad hoc policy responses that might be developed in a crisis atmosphere.

A variety of mechanisms could be made available for providing incremental allowances to the reserve.  For example, specific criteria could be established up front to grant the Governor discretion (allowed under AB 32) to relax compliance obligations.  Or provision could be made to replenish the reserve with allowances from other cap-and-trade systems or from the post-2020 AB 32 system.  Another possibility (recommended by Dallas Burtraw of Resources for the Future) would be overlapping compliance periods, which in effect provide for limiting borrowing, as well as banking, thereby providing an additional cushion on price changes.

Of course, the most effective device would be a simple safety valve (or price collar), whereby the government would offer to sell an unlimited number of allowances at a given price, thereby capping allowance prices and abatement costs.  However, my understanding is that the authorities at the California Air Resources Board (ARB) believe that this would not be allowed under AB 32, since a safety valve could result in the statute’s specific emissions targets not being met.

Issue 2:  Offsets

Offsets (emission reduction credits) from outside the AB 32 cap-and-trade system made available to entities with AB 32 compliance responsibilities can effectively limit allowance prices (and abatement costs).  What are needed now are administrative procedures that are efficient (low transaction costs) and ensure the environmental integrity of offsets.  This is fundamentally a question of balance.  Too much attention to efficient procedures of providing a large number of offsets risks flooding the market with meaningless offsets that lack additionality.  And a singular focus on environmental integrity will result in virtually no offsets being made available.

Up until now, relatively few offsets have been certified under existing ARB procedures.  It would be helpful to identify an appropriate potential supply of offset types.  Currently eligible offset types appear to be insufficient to take advantage of full offset flexibility.  It’s also important to establish appropriate liability rules for offset integrity.  A “seller-liability-first/buyer-liability-second” approach may offer efficiencies over the current buyer-liability approach.

Issue 3:  Allowance Holding Limits

Limits on purchases and holdings of allowances, intended to discourage market manipulation, could put in place a “cure” that is significantly more harmful than the “illness” it’s intended to address.  Rules for allowance holding and transacting are needed that carefully balance multiple considerations:  potential market manipulation; maintenance of adequate market liquidity; cost-effective program compliance (for example, to avoid constraining allowance banking); and effective risk management.

To that end, potential improvements would include establishing greater flexibility for legitimate banking, hedging, and risk-management purposes.  Also helpful would be tailoring holding limits to recognize market-participant differences, taking account of the size of a firm’s compliance obligations and the purpose of its holdings.  Finally, more frequent auctions would be helpful, including near the end of compliance periods, when market manipulation is most likely.

The Path Ahead

The California Air Resources Board has done a remarkable job in its initial design of the rules for its path-breaking GHG cap-and-trade system.  That’s not to say that it is perfect, or that it could be perfect.  There will inevitably be unanticipated challenges that will arise, whether from complying firms, from the broader economy, from litigation, or from other legislation.  The goal at this stage should be to design a system that is reasonably robust to such unanticipated shocks.

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