Lars Gårn Hansen

Theoretical papers show that there could be a welfare gain from switching to tax regulation if managers are more uncertain about key parameters of a fishery than fishermen. We estimate the size of the welfare gain that would result if a manager of the Danish cod fishery in the Kattegat switched from the current individual transferable quota system to tax regulation. We find that this would generate a small welfare gain of 0.023% of the industry profit and variations in parameter values (+/- 20 %) at most result in a gain of 0.029%

Residential biomass burning is estimated to cause 29,000 premature deaths in Europe and North America annually. A number of studies show that existing regulations, primarily affecting new stoves, in the European Union and North America are effective in reducing emissions. However, it is not clear from these studies if there is a net welfare gain from regulation, nor how regulations should be designed in order to maximise the net welfare gain. We use an integrated assessment model to compare the net welfare gains of different schemes for regulating existing wood-burning stoves in Denmark. Most schemes we asses generate a net welfare gain, but a geographically differentiated tax on stove use generates the largest net gain. The results for Denmark suggest that there could be substantial welfare gains from imposing geographically differentiated regulation of existing residential wood-burning stoves in parts of North America and the EU.

In this paper, we study regulation of externalities involving many small-scale polluters, where the damages from emissions depend on the polluters’ locations. Examples include nutrient and pesticide emissions from farms, particulate emissions from vehicles and home heating units, emissions of hazardous chemical compounds from small business etc. With such emission problems, regulatory authorities often apply a combination of firm-level, possibly differentiated standards for ‘cleaner’ technologies, and market-level, undifferentiated dirty input regulations. We establish general principles for how such regulations should be designed and combined. We find that the optimal regulation design crucially depends on the type of cleaner technologies available to polluters. If these are ‘emission capturing’, optimal technology standards encourage the use of cleaner technologies in both high and low damage areas, while if they are ‘input displacing’, optimal technology regulation encourages cleaner technologies in high damage areas, but discourages their use in low damage areas. Regulation should always discourage the use of dirty input and the optimal regulation intensity may be substantial, particularly if the available cleaner technologies are input displacing.

Earlier studies have found that framing has a substantial impact on the degree of cooperation observed in public good experiments. We show that the way the public good game is framed affects misperceptions about the incentives of the game. Moreover, we show that such framing‐induced differences in misperceptions are linked to the framing effect on subjects' cooperation behavior. When we do not control for the different levels of misperceptions between frames, we observe a significant framing effect on subjects' cooperation preferences. However, this framing effect becomes insignificant once we remove subjects who misperceive.