From time to time, something occurs that is outside the range of what is normally expected. This is called a tail event in the sense that it is way out the tail of a probability distribution. This article considers the implications of tail events for economic policy and climate change economics....

This article presents an integrated framework for assessing water markets in terms of their institutional foundations, economic efficiency, and environmental sustainability. This framework can be a tool for (a) comparing different water markets, (b) tracking performance over time, and (c)...

This article presents new evidence on very long-run trends in the prices of energy and energy services, such as heat, power, transport, and light, using seven hundred years of data for the United Kingdom. The article has two main findings. First, it shows that, in general, there was an upward...

Until recently, most attention to U.S. climate policy has focused on legislative efforts to introduce a price on carbon through cap and trade. In the absence of such legislation, the Clean Air Act is a potentially effective vehicle for achieving reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions....

In this article, I revisit some basic issues concerning structural uncertainty and catastrophic climate change. My target audience here are general economists, so this article could also be viewed as a somewhat less technical exposition that supplements my previous work. Using empirical...

Climate policy is complicated by the considerable uncertainties concerning the benefits and costs of abatement. We do not even know the probability distributions for future temperatures and impacts, making benefit--cost analysis based on expected values challenging to say the least. There are...

Consilience refers to the linking together of principles from different disciplines to form new constructs. How important has consilience been in bringing new ideas to the management of natural resources and the environment? To what extent has it influenced modes of analysis and policy? These...