For the past two decades, studies measuring social preferences in developing settings have played an important role in building our understanding of economic development and poverty. This book chapter reviews lab-in-the-field experiments that measure social preferences, summarizes categories of...

It is a well known fact that economic development and distance to the equator are positively correlated variables in the world today. It is perhaps less well known that as recently as 1500 C.E. it was the other way around. The present paper provides a theory of why the "latitude gradient"...

The environmental regulations US firms are exposed to are often place-based, incentivizing firms to move to less regulated counties or states. Consistent with this argument, multiplant firms partially regulated under the ozone regulations of the US Clean Air Act offset regulation-induced...

A growing literature has shown that behavioral biases influence consumer choices. Such socalled internalities are ubiquitous in many settings, including energy efficiency investments and the consumption of sin goods, such as cigarettes and sugar. In this paper, we use a mechanism design approach...

In this paper we test empirically with the Nordhaus and Yang (1996) RICE model the core property of the transfer scheme adv ocated by Germain, Toint and Tulkens (1997). This scheme is designed to sustain full cooperation in a voluntary international environmental agreement by making all...

A small open economy produces a consumer good, green and black energy, and imports fossil fuel at an uncertain price. Unregulated competitive markets are shown to be inefficient. The implied market failures are due to the agents' attitudes toward risk, to risk shifting and the uniform price for...

When confronted with market weaknesses and failures determining sustainability problems for environmental common-pool resources, economic analysis has proposed government intervention as the only alternative available. Elinor Ostrom showed that this dichotomy between market and government is not...

We consider environmental regulation in a context where firms invest in abatement technology under conditions of uncertainty about subsequent abatement cost, but can subsequently adjust output in the light of true marginal abatement cost. Where an emission tax is the only available instrument,...

Economic models of climate policy (or policies to combat other environmental problems) typically neglect psychological adaptation to changing life circumstances. People may adapt or become more sensitive, to different degrees, to a deteriorated environment. The present paper addresses these...