About

Antonio M. Bento is a faculty member at USC Price, involved in research and teaching related to public policy, urban planning, and real estate development. His work encompasses a broad range of topics including environmental sustainability, health policy, and social innovation, contributing to the development of policies and strategies that address urban growth, sustainability, and community well-being. Bento's expertise supports the university's mission to advance knowledge and practice in public policy and urban development, fostering innovative solutions to complex societal challenges.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Business
• Environmental science
• Bioinformatics
• Ecology
• Medicine
• Engineering
• Econometrics
• Biology
• Environmental health
• Mathematics
• Environmental resource management
• Climatology
• Transport engineering
• Microeconomics
• Macroeconomics

Selected publications

• Emergency Response Mechanisms for addressing challenges with high gas prices in international energy markets

  Econstor (Econstor) · 2026-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Recent natural gas price surges prompted the adoption of various policies, such as a natural gas price cap, aimed at preserving climate goals and preventing increases in wholesale electricity prices. However, it is unclear whether such policies are effective. Here, we take advantage of the unexpected spike in natural gas prices around the time of the Russian invasion into Ukraine to estimate the effects of such a spike on coal generation, carbon emissions, and wholesale electricity prices, highlighting its heterogeneous impacts in 13 EU countries that still rely on both coal and gas for electricity production. We use these estimates to show that the effectiveness of the gas price cap is limited, and instead propose an emergency response mechanism that would simultaneously safeguard the EU's climate policy and protect households from excessive fluctuation in natural gas prices. The proposed mechanism introduces an emergency auction reserve price within the existing EU Emissions Trading System, triggered automatically under predefined rules whenever gas prices reach unusually high levels. Revenues generated by the reserve price would be used to provide relief to consumers. Our results demonstrate that a modest emergency reserve price could serve as an effective response mechanism and that this approach overcomes key shortcomings of the widely used natural gas price cap.

  Publisher

• EU-ETS emergency reserve price curbs coal use and shields consumers during natural gas price shocks

  Nature Communications · 2026-05-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Recurring surges in natural gas prices strain climate policy by raising electricity prices, inducing gas-to-coal switching, prompting discretionary interventions, and fueling pressure to weaken decarbonization. We develop an empirical framework that quantifies how gas price spikes compromise climate policy and provides a toolkit to assess emissions trading system responses based on environmental effectiveness and their capacity to limit high electricity prices. Exploiting the gas price shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we estimate the impacts of gas prices on coal generation, CO 2 emissions, and electricity prices across 13 EU countries using hourly electricity market data. We find that the EU’s gas price cap has limited effectiveness and instead propose a resilient rule-based emergency mechanism within the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). A modest auction reserve price, automatically triggered when gas prices exceed historical benchmarks, can protect consumers while preserving decarbonization incentives and limiting the need for ad hoc interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Coal Phase-out in a Second-Best Setting: Evidence from China’s Coal-To-Gas Transition

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Decarbonization and electricity price vulnerability

  Nature Sustainability · 2025-01-07 · 12 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Maintaining Vehicle Emission Reduction Rates Requires Policies to Remove Cars From the Road

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Value of Urgency: Evidence from Real-Time Congestion Pricing

  Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics · 2024-06-17 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the setting of Los Angeles’s ExpressLanes, we uncover the distribution of individuals’ preferences for time savings in a novel application of a hedonic pricing model. We introduce the concept of the value of urgency, defined by willingness to pay (WTP) a toll to avoid a congested alternative route. The value of urgency does not scale in the amount of time saved, reflecting discrete penalties for late arrival. This value accounts for 87% of total WTP to use the ExpressLanes, while the contributions to WTP from other widely used valuation measures are negligible. We suggest that quality-of-service pricing that varies in real time and removes uncertainty over travel times creates new markets for individuals to reveal their preferences for urgency.

  PublisherDOI

• Environmental Policy and the Double Dividend Hypothesis

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science · 2024-03-19 · 1 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Since the 1990s, the so-called double-dividend debate—that is, the possibility that swaps of newly environmental taxes for existing distortionary taxes such as taxes on labor or capital could simultaneously improve environmental quality and reduce the distortionary costs of tax system—has attracted the attention of policymakers and academics. And while prior to the 1990s environmental economics as a field was not ready to inform this debate, scholars quickly moved to incorporate insights of the theory of second-best from public economics to inform the discussion. The result was a substantial advancement of the field of environmental economics, with the evaluation of the welfare effects of alternative policy instruments relying on general equilibrium models with pre-existing distortions. Initially, scholars casted substantially doubt on the prospects of a double dividend, and suggested that environmental tax reforms would not reduce the distortionary costs of the tax system. This is because studies documented that the tax-interaction effect dominated the revenue-recycling effect. That is, newly environmental taxes interact with pre-existing distortions in labor markets. And even when the revenues of environmental taxes are used to cut the rate of the labor tax, the environmental tax reform exacerbates, rather than alleviate, pre-existing distortions in labor markets. Throughout the 2000s and in more recent decades, the literature has documented many instances where a double dividend is more likely to exist, including in the context of developing countries.

  PublisherDOI

• Marginal Emissions Pathways: Drivers and Implications

  Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy · 2023-04-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Decarbonization and Electricity Price Vulnerability: Lessons from the EuropeanEnergy Crisis

  Research Square · 2023-11-17

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Many countries in Europe have substantially increased their share of carbon-free electricity over the past decades. However, the dramatic 2021-2022 increase in European natural gas prices and electricity prices has raised concerns about the vulnerability of electricity markets. Here, we develop a country-specific metric of vulnerability and find that countries that pursued more aggressive electricity decarbonization are not more vulnerable to natural gas price shocks. However, countries with a higher share of intermittent renewable generation are slightly more vulnerable, potentially due to the complementarity of these technologies with natural gas generation. We show that heterogeneity in vulnerability implies country-specific policies are required to avoid unintended climate consequences of extreme electricity prices, in contrast to the existing uniform EU price cap. Our results emphasize that decarbonization goals can still be achieved without risking vulnerability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Incidental Adaptation: The Role of Non-climate Regulations

  Environmental and Resource Economics · 2023-08-15 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract When a non-climate institution, policy, or regulation corrects a pre-existing market failure that would be exacerbated by climate change, it may also incidentally induce climate adaptation. This regulation-induced adaptation can have large positive welfare effects. We develop a tractable analytical framework of a corrective regulation where the market failure interacts with climate, highlighting the mechanism of regulation-induced adaptation: reductions in the climate-exacerbated effects of pre-existing market failures. We demonstrate this empirically for the US from 1980 to 2013, showing that ambient ozone concentrations increase with rising temperatures, but that such increase is attenuated in counties that are out of attainment with the Clean Air Act’s ozone standards. Adaptation in nonattainment counties reduced the impact of a 1 °C increase in climate normal temperature on ozone concentration by 0.64 parts per billion, or about one-third of the total impact. Over half of that effect was induced by the standard, implying a regulation-induced welfare benefit of $412–471 million per year by mid-century under current warming projections.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Katja Vinha

  102 shared

• Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

  Yale University

  102 shared

• Maureen Cropper

  Resources For The Future

  102 shared

• Kevin Roth

  The University of Texas at Austin

  56 shared

• Kenneth Gillingham

  31 shared

• Noah Miller

  25 shared

• Ravi Kanbur

  20 shared

• Daniel Kaffine

  University of Colorado Boulder

  19 shared