TY  - JOUR
A1  - Edenhofer, Ottmar
A1  - Kalkuhl, Matthias
A1  - Requate, Tilman
A1  - Steckel, Jan Christoph
T1  - How assets get stranded
BT  - the impact of climate policy on capital and fossil fuel owners : introduction to the JEEM special section on climate policy and political economy
JF  - Journal of environmental economics and management
N2  - Internalizing external costs of carbon is a fundamental goal of climate policy. Since the seminal work of Arthur Pigou in 1920, economic theory has analyzed the efficiency gains arising from various instruments that internalize externalities and lead to Pareto-improvements. It is widely recognized in environmental economics that a carbon price would effectively reflect the scarcity of the atmospheric disposal space for carbon depending on the temperature target that is to be achieved. The question of how to organize the transition process, i.e. moving from inefficient to efficient allocations, and implementing the necessary policies, has gained increasing attention in recent years. Arguably, the transition process is tightly interwoven with political processes that include complex interactions between societal stakeholders, such as households and firms, on the one hand, and political decision makers, on the other. Accordingly, understanding political-economy aspects of the transition process, including distributional outcomes, is becoming increasingly relevant. While a growing literature discusses the distributional implications of climate policy on households, it is less well understood how asset owners might be affected by climate policy and how these potential impacts would interact with the transition process. This Special Section focuses on public policy challenges related to this transition problem, with special emphasis on asset owners. A core theme is the special role of stranded assets, i.e. a devaluation of capital stocks or financial assets either by introducing a stringent carbon price or by omitting a pre-announced policy of this kind.
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2020.102300
SN  - 0095-0696
SN  - 1096-0449
VL  - 100
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -