EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Unintended Consequences of Price Controls: An Application to Allowance Markets

Andrew Stocking

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Price controls established in an emissions allowance market to constrain allowance prices between a ceiling and a floor offer a mechanism to reduce cost uncertainty in a cap-and-trade program; however, they could provide opportunities for strategic actions by firms that would result in lower government revenue and greater emissions than in the absence of controls. In particular, when the ceiling price is supported by introducing new allowances into the market, firms could choose to buy allowances at the ceiling price, regardless of the prevailing market price, in order to lower the equilibrium price of all allowances. Those purchases could either be transacted by a group of firms intending to manipulate the market or be induced through the introduction of inaccurate information about the cost of emissions abatement that causes firms to purchase allowances at the ceiling. Theory and simulations using estimates of the elasticity of allowance demand for U.S. firms suggest that the manipulation could be profitable under the stylized setting and assumptions evaluated in the paper, although in practice many other conditions will determine its use.

Keywords: cap-and-trade; climate change; price controls; price ceiling; manipulation; allowance market; carbon market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D43 H41 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/25559/1/MPRA_paper_25559.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Unintended consequences of price controls: An application to allowance markets (2012) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:25559

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:25559