Juan-Pablo Montero

Forward trading and collusion in oligopoly

We consider an infinitely-repeated oligopoly in which at each period firms not only serve the spot market by either competing in prices or quantities but also have the opportunity to trade forward contracts. Contrary to the pro-competitive results of finite-horizon models, we find that the possibility of forward trading allows firms to sustain collusive profits that otherwise would not be possible. The result holds both for price and quantity competition and follows because (collusive) contracting of future sales is more effective in deterring deviations from the collusive plan than in inducing the previously identified pro-competitive effects.

Marketable pollution permits with uncertainty and transaction costs

Abstract Increasing interest in the use of marketable permits for pollution control has become evident in recent years. Concern regarding their performance still remains because empirical evidence has shown transaction costs and uncertainty to be significant in past and existing marketable permits programs. In this paper we develop theoretical and numerical models that include transaction costs and uncertainty (in trade approval) to show their effects on market performance (i.e., equilibrium price of permits and trading volume) and aggregate control costs. We also show that in the presence of transaction costs and uncertainty the initial allocation of permits may not be neutral in terms of efficiency. Furthermore, using a numerical model for a hypothetical NOx trading program in which participants have discrete control technology choices, we find that aggregate control costs and the equilibrium price of permits are sensitive to the initial allocation of permits, even for constant marginal transaction costs and certainty.

Prices versus quantities with incomplete enforcement

Abstract I study whether incomplete enforcement of a regulation has any impact on the choice between price (e.g., taxes) and quantity (e.g., tradeable quotas) instruments. Results indicate that a second-best design accounting for incomplete enforcement can be implemented equally well with either instrument as long as the benefit and cost curves are known with certainty. If these curves are uncertain to the regulator, however, the quantity instrument performs relatively better than the price instrument. The reason is that the effective amount of control under the quantity instrument is no longer fixed, which makes this instrument come closer to a non-linear instrument.

A MARKET-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY EXPERIMENT IN CHILE*

We evaluate the performance of an environmental market in a less developed country on the basis of the experiences of the particulate matter control program of Santiago, Chile. We find that grandfathering the permits has created economic incentives for incumbent sources to more readily declare their (historic) emissions in order to claim any permits. In addition, the market has not fully developed because of transaction costs, regulatory uncertainty, and incomplete enforcement. Nonetheless, it has provided sources with the flexibility to adapt to new market conditions. Our analysis of this particular experience indicates that market‐based policies can provide important advantages over traditional command‐and‐control policies even under limited institutional capabilities.

Optimal Design of a Phase-In Emissions Trading Program

Supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through an award the the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

Pollution markets with imperfectly observed emissions

I study the advantages of pollution permit markets over traditional standard regulations when the regulator has incomplete information on firms’ emissions and costs of production and abatement (e.g., air pollution in large cities). Because the regulator only observes each firm’s abatement technology but neither its emissions nor its output, there are cases in which standards can lead to lower emissions and, hence, welfare dominate permits. If permits are optimally combined with standards, in many cases this hybrid policy converges to the permits-alone policy but (almost) never to the standards-alone policy.

Market power in an exhaustible resource market: The case of storable pollution permits

Motivated by the structure of existing pollution permit markets, we study the equilibrium path that results from allocating an initial stock of storable permits to an agent, or a group of agents, in a position to exercise market power. A large seller of permits exercises market power no differently than a large supplier of an exhaustible resource. However, whenever the large agents endowment falls short of his efficient endowment – allocation profile that would exactly cover his emissions along the perfectly competitive path – market power is greatly mitigated by a commitment problem, much like in a durable-goods monopoly. We illustrate our theory with two applications: the US sulphur market and the international carbon market that may eventually develop beyond the Kyoto Protocol.

The Temporal Efficiency of SO2 Emissions Trading

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the temporal efficiency of the U.S. Acid Rain Program, which implemented a nationwide market for trading and banking sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances. We first develop a model of efficient banking and select appropriate parameter values. Then, we use aggregate data from the first seven years of the Acid Rain Program, to assess the temporal efficiency of the observed banking behavior. We find that banking has been surprisingly efficient and we discuss why this finding disagrees with the common perception of excessive banking in this program.

Precios eléctricos flexibles

One of the critiques to the regulatory framework of the Chilean electricity sector is the lack of flexibility for regulated prices (nodal prices) to adapt to changes in supply and demand. We develop a simple model to estimate welfare losses when using uni

Output-Expanding Collusion in the Presence of a Competitive Fringe

Following the structure of many commodity markets, we consider a few large firms and a competitive fringe of many small suppliers choosing quantities in an infinite-horizon setting subject to demand shocks. We show that a collusive agreement among the large firms may not only bring an output contraction but also an output expansion (relative to the non-collusive output level). The latter occurs during booms and is due to the strategic substitutability of quantities. We also find that the time at which maximal collusion is most difficult to sustain can be either at booms or recessions. The international copper cartel of 1935–39 is used to illustrate some of our results.