Effort to develop a mandatory climate policy is accelerating and it seems likely that a national market-based strategy for dealing with climate change is on the near term horizon.

This report offers a comprehensive analysis of a suite of climate policy initiatives associated with a cap and trade program with the goal of identifying those empirical and design issues that most influence the economic consequences of their enactment. Empirically, present-value policy costs heavily depend on the actual outcomes of household consumption-saving and labor-leisure decisions, the magnitudes of and any induced changes in sectoral demand elasticities and technological trends, and the resulting time paths of permit prices and market interest rates.