How have house prices evolved over the long-run? This paper presents annual house prices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. Based on extensive data collection, we show that real house prices stayed constant from the 19th to the mid-20th century, but rose strongly during the second half of the...

We measure the longer-term effect of a major earthquake on the local economy, using night-time light intensity measured from space, and investigate whether insurance claim payments for damaged residential property affected the local recovery process. We focus on the destructive Canterbury...

Policies of lowering carbon demand may aggravate rather than alleviate climate change (green paradox). In a two-period three-country general equilibrium model with finite endowment of fossil fuel one country enforces an emissions cap in the first or second period. When that cap is tightened the...

Judged by the principle of intertemporal Pareto optimality, insecure property rights and the greenhouse effect both imply overly rapid extraction of fossil carbon resources. A gradual expansion of demand-reducing public policies – such as increasing ad-valorem taxes on carbon consumption or...

The nature of oil demand influences the oil extraction rate and hence has implications for both the timing of oil exhaustion and optimal climate policy. We analyse what role oil demand specification plays in strategic interactions b between an oil-importing country producing final goods and...

We build a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model with one-sided substitutability between fossil carbon and biocarbon. One shock only, the discovery of the technology to use fossil fuels, leads to a transition from an initial pre-industrial phase to three following phases: a pure fossil...

Internalizing the global negative externality of carbon emissions requires flattening the extraction path of world fossil energy resources (= world carbon emissions). We consider governments having sign-unconstrained emission taxes at their disposal and seeking to prevent world emissions from...

We study backstop adoption and carbon dioxide emission paths in a two-region model with unilateral climate policy and non-renewable resource consumption. The regions have an equal endowment of the internationally tradable resource and a backstop technology. We first study the case of a...

This paper addresses two basic issues related to technological innovation and climate stabilisation objectives: i) Can innovation policies be effective in stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations? ii) To what extent can innovation policies complement carbon pricing (taxes or permit trading) and...

This paper provides a formal survey of price and quantity instruments for mitigating global warming. We explicitly consider policies’ impact on the incentives of resource owners who maximize their profits intertemporally. We focus on the informational and commitment requirements of the...