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We study the impact of a supply management mechanism (SMM) similar to the Market Stability Reserve proposed in 2015 which preserve the overall emissions cap and we comment on the recent cap-changing amendments. We provide an analytical description of the conditions under which an SMM alters the emissions abatement paths, affecting the expected length of the banking period and its variability. While abatement strategies of risk neutral firms solely depend on the former, for riskaverse firms changes in the latter would lead to higher risk premia, accelerated depletion of the bank and, consequently, further reduction of abatement and allowance prices. Cancellation of part of the reserve could partially outweigh the effect on risk premia sustaining allowance prices.

Emissions Trading Systems (ETSs) with fixed caps lack provisions to address systematic imbalances in the supply and demand of permits due to changes in the state of the regulated economy. We propose a mechanism which adjusts the allocation of permits based on the current bank of permits. The mechanism spans the spectrum between a pure quantity instrument and a pure price instrument. We solve the firms' emissions control problem and obtain an explicit dependency between the key policy stringency parameter – the adjustment rate – and the firms' abatement and trading strategies. We present an analytical tool for selecting the optimal adjustment rate under both risk-neutrality and risk-aversion, which provides an analytical basis for the regulator's choice of a responsive ETS policy.

The supply of allowances in the European Union Emissions Trading System is determined within a rigid allocation programme. A reform of the EU ETS intends to make allowances allocation exible and contingent on the state of the system. We model the emissions market under adjustable allowance supply in a stochastic partial equilibrium framework and obtain closed form solutions for its dynamics. The model considers a supply control mechanism contingent on the number of allocated and unused allowances, as suggested by the European Commission. We derive analytical dependencies between the allowance allocation adjustment rate and the market equilibrium dynamics, which allows us to represent the quantity thresholds as quantiles for the number of allocated and unused allowances. Finally, we present an analytical tool for the selection of an optimal adjustment rate under both risk-neutrality and risk-aversion. We thereby provide an analytical foundation for the regulator's decision-making in the context of the EU ETS reform and give a novel perspective on the mechanism's overall design.