Essays on climate change policy evaluation

Climate Change is a global problem that affects several dimensions of human activities. The peculiarity and complexity of the problem let Climate Policies very challenging to design. Moreover, Climate Change has public good characteristics and can lead to free-riding. For these reasons, Economic Literature uses intensively game-theoretic approaches in order to model and assess Climate Change policies. The aim of this Doctoral Thesis is threefold: i) to provide a comprehensive review of the economic theory and empirical studies behind International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) and Regional Environmental Policies, with a specific focus on two major examples coming from the European experience: the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and Renewable Energy Sources; ii) to empirically assess the cooperative nature of the Nationally Determined Contributions of the Paris Agreement (the latest and broadest IEA) and to provide an empirically-based methodology in order to forecast potential cheaters to the Paris Agreement and to identify the socio-economic determinants that could lead a country to defeat from its commitment; iii) to study the socio-economic and political drivers of Photovoltaic Panels deployment in Italian cities under the Feed-in Tariff mechanisms, Conto Energia by adopting a spatial econometric approach. The structure of this Thesis follows a general-to-specific approach in order to account for different dimensions of Climate Change policy, from the global (International Environmental Agreements) to local perspective (Italian Feed-in Tariff mechanism at the city-livel). The final goal is to provide a longitudinal assessment of different types of Climate Change mitigation policies through the application of econometric tools.