Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are changing the energy balance of our planet. Various climatic feedbacks make the resulting warming over the next decades and centuries highly uncertain. We quantify how this uncertainty changes the optimal carbon tax in a stochastic dynamic programming...

Uncertainty has an almost negligible impact on project value in the economic standard model. I show that a comprehensive evaluation of uncertainty and uncertainty attitude changes this picture fundamentally. The analysis relies on the discount rate, which is the crucial determinant in balancing...

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are changing the energy balance of our planet. Various climatic feedbacks make the resulting warming over the next decades and centuries highly uncertain. We quantify how this uncertainty changes the optimal carbon tax in a stochastic dynamic programming...

“Prices versus quantities” (Weitzman 1974), a hugely influential paper, is widely cited (and taught) in current debates about the best policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The paper’s criterion for ranking policies suggests that technological uncertainty favors taxes over cap and...

We provide ex-post empirical analysis of the effects of climate policies on carbon dioxide emissions at the aggregate national level. Our results are based on a comprehensive database of 121 countries. As climate policies we examine carbon taxes and emissions trading systems (ETS), as well as...

In the last two decades increasing attention has been paid to the relationship between environmental degradation and economic development. According to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis this relationship may be described by an inverted-U curve. However, recent evidence rejects the...

Has the Kyoto Protocol induced carbon leakage? We conduct the first empirical ex-post evaluation of the Protocol. We derive a theoretical gravity equation for the CO2 content of trade, which accounts for intermediate inputs, both domestic and imported. The structure of our new panel database of...

The UK has pledged to cut greenhouse gases 68 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, to be emissions neutral by 2050, and to phase out internal combustion engine vehicles by 2030. Much progress has been made, but fully achieving these ambitious objectives with the current policy framework will be...

The amount of CO2 embedded in trade has substantially increased over the last decades. We study the trends and some drivers of the carbon content of trade over the period 1995-2009. Our main findings are the following. First, the mix of traded goods tends to have higher emission intensity than...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...