Essays on the Economics of Carbon Pricing

This research examines the economics of carbon pricing programs with a focus on evaluating issues relating to distribution and equity concerning these policies. The first substantive chapter, Chapter 2, empirically examines a policy question that emerged in evaluating California's carbon cap-and-trade bill. Many environmentalist and environmental justice groups felt that the carbon cap-and-trade program was causing non-carbon ``copollutants'' to be reduced by lesser amounts in low socioeconomic status neighborhoods. I find no evidence, at least in the electricity sector, that these concerns are borne out by the data. The second and third substantive chapter describe a stated-preference survey of a large public university on the topic of internal carbon pricing programs. Internal carbon pricing programs voluntarily place a fee on an institutions carbon emissions as a way of encourage emission reductions, raise funds for emission reduction projects and establish a reputation for sustainability. Chapter 3 (With Trudy Ann Cameron and Steve Mital) describe the results of a structural choice model estimated using data from the survey. The willingness to pay for these programs are found to depend on not only the amount of carbon dioxide reductions achieved, but also depend on the distribution of the costs of the program, as well as the distribution of any revenue the program raises. Distributions for willingness to pay across the entire campus community are calculated for several models. Chapter 4 presents a methodology that can be used to ``transfer'' the results and estimates from Chapter 3 to a different, unsurveyed university. Support for internal carbon pricing programs is found to heavily depend on the political and socioeconomic composition of the university population. This dissertation includes previously unpublished co-authored material