Résumé
Whether under specific lobby pressure, to satisfy citizen demands or just as a part of day-to-day business, policymakers must constantly make choices about how to allocate public resources. As economics is the study of allocation of scarce resources, optimizing resource use by finding, ex-ante, the policy with the highest probability of success has received specific attention in the discipline. This is especially true for a domain such as environmental protection, which is affected by multiple market failures. Various tools in economics, including discrete choice experiments, laboratory experiments, and computable equilibrium models, are used by researcher to find the most appropriate policy designs. In the first part of this synthesis, I use the aforementioned methodological typology to present my contributions to the design and ex-ante evaluation of public policies.Next, comes the evaluation of the additionality versus windfall effect of a policy, which helps policymakers decide whether the policy should be scaled-up or (dis)continued. In that case, micro-econometric tools for program evaluation can come in handy, since the main challenge is to build a proper counterfactual against which the group that has benefited from the policy can be compared. In the second part of this synthesis, I will begin with works in which I try to measure the impact on program effectiveness of undesired spillovers or interactions among agents. Next, I will look at programs that rely on the influence of peers to improve effectiveness. Finally, I will focus on various aspects of individual subsidies: how they compare with other instruments, whether multiple subsidies each targeting a specific practice are preferable to a comprehensive one, and how to articulate subsidies and regulatory instruments in time.