Seminar: Non-Market Values and General Equilibrium Assessments of Environmental Policy

Date(s): December 8, 2009, 11:00am

Location: Room 4128, EPA West, 1301 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC

Contact: Carl Pasurka, 202-566-2275

Presenter(s): Jared Carbone (Department of Economics and the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy; University of Calgary)

Description: Applied general equilibrium (AGE) modeling is a workhorse tool for researchers seeking to quantify the impacts of policy reforms on the market economy. In the study of environmental regulation, they have been used to study the dynamic cost of pollution regulations, tax interaction effects and the international trade implications of policies to control greenhouse gas emissions to name a few prominent applications. Despite the fact that many of the perceived benefits of environmental regulations are realized outside of the market economy, these types of effects are typically absent from applications of AGE models. This talk will focus on motivating and describing some initial steps in the process developing a new generation of AGE models in which changes in the level of non-market services have the potential to feed back and impact resource allocation throughout the economy. I will sketch a number of different applications of this idea as a way of illustrating the potential gains from and obstacles to performing this type of analysis.

Seminar Category: Climate Economics