EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Maximizing the impact of climate finance: Funding projects or pilot projects?

Matthew Kotchen and Christopher Costello

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2018, vol. 92, issue C, 270-281

Abstract: When and how should public agencies provide finance to the private sector in support of climate change mitigation and adaptation? We distinguish theoretically between pilot projects, whose main objective is to obtain information about the desirability of a climate-related project, and full projects, which are at-scale and are often quite risky. When a successful project has distinct private and public benefits, a publicly-funded subsidy may be warranted to induce a pilot project, a full project, or both. We draw on insights about the value of experimentation for entrepreneurship and raising private capital to derive insights about when subsidizing projects or pilots is more efficient. We find that pilot projects have many virtues not previously examined, and these often render them the optimal target of public subsidies to the private sector.

JEL-codes: G38 H4 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069618304819
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Maximizing the Impact of Climate Finance: Funding Projects or Pilot Projects? (2017) 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:eee:jeeman:v:92:y:2018:i:c:p:270-281

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeem.2018.08.009

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management is currently edited by M.A. Cole, A. Lange, D.J. Phaneuf, D. Popp, M.J. Roberts, M.D. Smith, C. Timmins, Q. Weninger and A.J. Yates

More articles in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:eee:jeeman:v:92:y:2018:i:c:p:270-281