Carbon Abatement Costs: Why the Wide Range of Estimates?

Carolyn Fischer and Richard Morgenstern ()
Additional contact information
Richard Morgenstern: Resources for the Future

Discussion Papers from Resources For the Future

Abstract: Estimates of marginal abatement costs for reducing carbon emissions derived from major economic-energy models vary widely. Controlling for policy regimes, we use meta-analysis to examine the importance of structural modeling choices in explaining differences in estimates. The analysis indicates that particular assumptions about perfectly foresighted consumers and Armington trade elasticities generate lower estimates of marginal abatement costs. Other choices are associated with higher cost estimates, including perfectly mobile capital, inclusion of a backstop technology, and greater disaggregation among regions and sectors. Some features, such as greater technological detail, seem less significant. Understanding the importance of key modeling assumptions, as well as the way the models are used to estimate abatement costs, can help guide the development of consistent modeling practices for policy evaluation.

Keywords: climate models; carbon tax (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q4 Q25 D58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
Date: 2003-09-01
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/documents/RFF-DP-03-42-REV.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-03-42-rev

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Resources For the Future
Series data maintained by Webmaster ().