L’objectif de cet article est d’évaluer si la Responsabilité Elargie du Producteur appliquée aux emballages ménagers fournit les incitations adéquates à la réduction à la source des emballages. La théorie économique prédit que le niveau d’incitation socialement efficace sera obtenu si l’écocontribution versée par chaque conditionneur à l’éco-organisme Citéo est égale au coût externe des emballages qu’il met sur le marché, entendu comme la somme du coût économique de traitement des déchets générés et de son coût environnemental. A l’aide de données de l’ADEME, de Citéo, de CE Delft et du WWF, nous montrons que les écocontributions n’internalisent que 43 % du coût externe, ce qui correspond à un coût non internalisé proche de 900 millions d’euros par an. A des degrés divers, tous les matériaux contribuent au déficit. L’acier est toutefois le plus grand contributeur devant le plastique et le verre. En outre, les taux appliqués aux différents matériaux ne sont pas en cohérence avec les coûts économiques de leur fin de vie et leur impacts environnementaux Ainsi l’écocontribution payée pour un emballage en verre ne représente que 12% de son coût externe, loin derrière le plastique (63 %) et le papier-carton (62%). Le dispositif conduit alors à des efforts d’écoconception trop modestes et dans des directions qui vont à l’encontre de la réduction du coût économique et environnemental des déchets d’emballages. Ces éléments fournissent des éléments pour réformer le barème de la REP emballages au profit de la réduction à la source.

We examine the effect of Intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on the two main channels of international transfer of low-carbon technologies i.e. trade in low-carbon capital goods, and foreign direct investments (FDI) by firms producing low-carbon technologies. Our data describes cross-country transfer through these channels between developing and developed countries in eight climate-related technology fields from 2006 to 2015. At the world level, we find that strengthening IPR protection increases transfer in six technology fields (solar PV, solar thermal, wind power, heating, lighting, and cleaner vehicles), while the effect is statistically insignificant in the others. However, when focusing on non-OECD countries, we find that a stricter IPR does not influence trade in low-carbon capital goods but is a significant determinant of inward FDI for most low-carbon technologies. These results have important implications for climate negotiations on North-South technology transfer. (revised Feb. 2019)

This paper studies the impact of age and reactor technology on safety in the French nuclear fleet between 1997 and 2015. We use a novel dataset encompassing over 19,000 nuclear safety events declared by plant managers to the French regulatory agency. A major problem for evaluating the effects of age and technology is that declarations of safety events are influenced by the plant managers’ level of transparency. We deal with this problem by restricting the analysis to the occurrences of particular types of events, such as automatic shut-downs. These events, due to their technical specifics, exhibit perfect detection and declaration rates. We obtain the following results. First, technology has a strong impact on reactor safety. Second, age has a significant and technology-specific effect on reactor safety. For instance, while in 1997 one additional year of age led to a 15% increase in the expected number of automatic shut-downs among the 900 MW reactors, this number was reduced to only 6% in 2014. In comparison, the 1450 MW reactors undergo a significantly larger number of automatic shut-downs, but age has a smaller effect on their rate of occurrence. Finally, we find that local transparency, defined as both detection abilities, reporting behaviours and declaration guidelines, plays a significant role in the explanation of the observed variations of declarations of events.

Using household-level data from the American Housing Survey, this paper assesses the cost of adapting housing to temperature increases. We account for both energy use adjustments and capital adjustments through investments in weatherization and heating and cooling equipment. Our best estimate of the present discounted value of the cost for adapting to the A2 "business-as-usual" climate scenario by the end of the century is $5,600 per housing unit, including both energy and investment costs. A more intense use of air conditioners will be compensated for by a reduction in heating need, leading to a shift from gas to electricity consumption.

Assessing the risks of rare disasters due to the production of energy is paramount when making energy policy decisions. Yet, the costs associated with these risks are most often not calculable due to the high uncertainties that characterize their potential consequences. In this paper, we propose a non-Bayesian method for the calculation of the expected cost of rare energy disasters, that accounts for the ambiguity that characterizes the probabilities of these events. Ambiguity is defined as the existence of multiple and conflicting sources of information regarding the probabilities associated with these events. We then apply this method to the particular case of nuclear accidents in new builds. Our results suggests that the upper-bound of the expected cost of such accidents is 1.7€/MWh, which is consistent with most of the recent estimates. This expected cost may rise to 7€/MWh when the macroeconomic shock caused by a nuclear accident is taken into account.

Because ICT standard frequently incorporate patented inventions, standard setting organizations have designed intellectual property policies whereby the owners of such "standard essential patents" must commit ex ante to license them on fair reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to manufacturers of standard-compliant products. However, these commitments are vague and may not be sufficient to prevent patent hold-up in practice. In this paper, we develop a simple framework to analyze the consequence of ineffective FRAND commitments, and compare them with legally binding commitments on a royalty level or a royalty cap. We show that the cap is systematically preferred by the licensor, while it has ambiguous effects on consumers depending on the licensorís preferred alternative strategy.

When evaluating policy treatments that are persistent and endogenous, available instrumental variables often exhibit more variation over time than the treatment variable. This leads to a weak instrumental variable problem, resulting in high bias or uninformative confidence intervals. We propose two new estimation approachesthat strengthen the instrument. We derive their theoretical properties and show in Monte Carlo simulations that they outperform standard IV-estimators. We use our procedures to estimate the effect of public utility divestiture in the U.S. nuclear energy sector. Our results show that divestiture significantly increases production efficiency.

In countries with limited exhaustible natural resources, reducing imports of raw materials is increasingly viewed as a significant side benefit of waste recycling. Using a panel of 21 developed and developing countries from 1994-2008, we seek to measure the size of this benefit by estimating the impact of metal scrap recovery on imports of metallic raw materials. We deal with the endogeneity of metal recovery with exogenous country characteristics including population density, the level of education, and knowledge of environmental technologies. We also develop a strategy for controlling for the price volatility in raw material markets. We find that increasing metal recovery by 10% reduces imports of metallic raw materials by 3.3% in our base specification. This result confirms that waste policies that favor recycling may have a sizeable impact on the balance of trade