Calendrier du 13 mai 2019
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 13/05/2019 de 17:00 à 18:30
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
LOEPER Antoine (UC3M)
Policy responsiveness versus stability: the role of institutions
écrit avec Wiola Dziuda
Institutions with checks and balances (e.g., supermajority requirements, bicameralism, constitutional courts) are often celebrated for their effect on the stability and predictability of policies, which is desirable for economic prosperity. However, checks and balances may also prevent governments from adapting policies to a changing environment. An ideal political system should balance these competing concerns.
To analyze the determinants of this trade-off, we build a parsimonious model of dynamic policy-making in which policy makers' preferences are subject to shocks, but policy change is inherently costly. Institutions are defined broadly as a mapping from current policies and power arrangement into future power arrangement. We show that the impact of institutions on policy change is exacerbated by the strategic response of the policy makers to the institution, which makes the comparison across institutions non-trivial. We characterize the optimal institution as a function of the primitives. Political turn-over make policies more unstable, but also makes policy makers vote in a more congruent way. Conversely, checks and balances make policies more unstable, but also make policy makers vote in a more polarized way. Checks and balances remain optimal when the policy makers' ideologies are sufficiently polarized.
Régulation et Environnement
Du 13/05/2019 de 12:00 à 13:00
salle R1-13, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
LEROUTIER Marion (PSE)
Carbon Pricing and Power Sector Decarbonisation: Evidence from the UK
The electricity and heat generation sector represents about 40 % of global greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions in 2016. Policy-makers have implemented a variety of instru-
ments to decarbonise their power sector. This paper examines the UK Carbon Price
Floor (CPF), a novel carbon pricing instrument implemented in the United Kingdom
in 2013. After describing the potential mechanisms behind the recent UK power sector
decarbonisation, I apply the synthetic control method on country-level data to estimate
the impact of the CPF on per capita emissions. I discuss the importance of potential
confounders and the amount of net electricity imports imputable to the policy. De-
pending on the speci_cation, the abatement associated with the introduction of the
CPF range from 104 to 156 millions tons of equivalent CO2 over the 2013-2017 period.
This implies a reduction of between 39% and 48% of total power sector emissions by
2017. Several placebo tests suggest that these estimates capture a causal impact. This
paper shows that a carbon levy on high-emitting inputs used for electricity generation
can lead to successful decarbonisation.