Conference Agenda

The global rise in obesity, together with the food system’s substantial contribution to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, underscores the need for effective government intervention. This paper develops an overlapping generations (OLG) model to analyze the long-term public health and environmental impacts of a school canteen policy that promotes sustainable meals. We show theoretically that, relative to a food tax, school meal policy can generate higher welfare. Importantly, school meal policy is not a substitute for food taxation but can act as an additional policy instrument. Indeed, while the school canteen policy shapes dietary habits from childhood, the food tax policy has a more instantaneous impact on consumption of unhealthy foods. Numerical simulations calibrated to French data confirm that a school meal policy may outperform a food tax in terms of welfare. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first theoretical contribution to explicitly analyze a school meal policy within a unified framework of health and environmental externalities, and intergenerational welfare.

This paper examines optimal environmental regulation based on emission or performance standards in the presence of consumer search and firm innovation. With an exogenous market structure, we find that the emission and performance standards lead to the same equilibrium level of innovation, which decreases in the number of firms in a Schumpeterian way, and these two policy tools are equivalent in terms of total welfare but not in distributional terms because they give rise to different levels of consumer and producer surplus. Here, low search costs can lead to price-increasing competition for concentrated industries. With an endogenous market structure, the two regulatory instruments lead to different levels of total welfare, they both yield excessive firm entry, and the magnitude of the inefficiency from excessive entry is relatively greater under the emission standard.

To reduce Russia's ability to fund its war in Ukraine, Western governments imposed a price ceiling on Russian seaborne oil exports. Policy-makers sought a ceiling level which minimizes Russia's oil profits without raising excessively the world price buyers pay for oil. We formalize this choice as a constrained minimization problem and illustrate its solution using two models: the Pigou-Robinson (1933) monopoly model and the Turner-Sappington (2024) duopoly model. Although nearly a century separates formulation of these two models, we show that they have virtually the same implications for the constrained minimization problem we have formulated.

Subsidies for dual-fuel vehicles often backfire, a problem plaguing modern Plug-in Hybrids (PHEVs). This paper identifies the structural mechanism of this failure by analyzing its historical prototype: the Swedish Green Car Rebate (GCR). Using comprehensive vehicle characteristics, I show how asymmetric standards incentivize regulatory arbitrage over innovation. Automakers exploited the loophole by converting captive gasoline models into Flexible-Fuel Vehicles (FFVs), thereby increasing average emissions by ~14 gCO2/km. This supply-side gaming was compounded by demand-side “fuel arbitrage,” where drivers prioritized price over emissions. The resulting policy paradox – where environmental failure unintentionally mitigates energy

system strain – offers critical lessons for policy design.