What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’'s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that...

This paper builds a two-country (North, South), two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good is produced with a clean and a dirty input. I show that a...

The literature on within-firm organizational change and productivity suggests that firms can make more efficient use of certain technologies if complementary forms of organization are adopted. This issue may be of even greater importance for the case of greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement...

This paper analyses a set of new scenarios for energy markets in Europe to evaluate the consistency of economic incentives and climate objectives. It focuses in particular on the role of natural gas across a range of climate policy scenarios (including the Copenhagen Pledges and the EU Roadmap)...

The paper analyses the problem of optimal taxation in oligopoly when environmental degradation induced by the industry production process feeds back into market demand. The main assumption is that economic agents and the policy-maker care about the environment only because its degradation...

This paper builds on the assumption that OECD countries are (or will soon be) taking actions to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. These actions, however, will not be sufficient to control global warming, unless developing countries also get involved in the cooperative effort to reduce GHG...

This paper studies technological change in renewable energies, providing empirical evidence on the determinants of innovative activity with a special emphasis on the role of knowledge spillovers. We investigate two major renewable energy technologies wind and solar across a panel of 21 OECD...

We study the allocation of several heterogenous, commonly ranked objects to impatient agents with privately known characteristics who arrive sequentially according to a Poisson or renewal process. We analyze and compare the policies that maximize either welfare or revenue. We focus on two cases:...

We study the efficiency property of responsive pricing - a scheme first proposed by Vickrey - that increases prices as a function of capacity utilization. We show that although responsive pricing implements allocations that are arbitrarily close to market clearing, these allocations are not...

Both the mining and the burning of coal is pollutive, so one might expect to observe taxes on coal production and consumption. Yet several countries in Western Europe subsidize coal production, and most East European countries subsidize coal consumption. The first part of this paper shows that...