The texts of the COP 21 Decision and its Annex are scrutinized from the particular point of view of the extent to which economic theoretic concepts can be considered to inspire them. While this is shown to be partially the case in some of the intentions, the texts themselves contain more...

Musgravian externalities, formulated and illustrated by Musgrave in a 1966 paper on social goods are seen in this paper as one form of the interactions that occur between the components of a federation. The original formal apparatus is first exposed briefly. In that context, it is then...

That climate policies are costly is evident and therefore often creates major fears. But the alternative (no action) also has a cost. Mitigation costs and damages incurred depend on what the climate policies are; moreover, they are substitutes. This brings climate policies naturally in the realm...

The usually assumed two categories of costs involved in climate change policy analysis, namely abatement and damage costs, hide the presence of a third category, namely adaptation costs. This dodges the determination of an appropriate level for them. Including adaptation costs explicitly in the...

Calling upon both positive and normative economics, we attempt to characterize the issues at stake in the current international negotiations on climatic change. We begin (section 2) by reviewing the main features of the Protocol. Then (Section 3), we identify by means of an elementary economic...

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...

The European population is living longer but retiring earlier. More and more individuals are spending an increasing fraction of their life-time relying on retirement benefits. At the same time, social security programs face mounting financial difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to explain...

This paper studies the optimal design of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) policies in an economy where individuals differ in their reproductive capacity (or fecundity) and in their wage. We find that the optimal ART policy varies with the postulated social welfare criterion....

This paper shows that the design of education policy involves a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. We consider a setting in which social mobility is maximized under the least elitist public education system, whereas welfare maximization calls for the most elitist system. We...

We study the role of social long term care (LTC) insurance when income taxation and private insurance markets are imperfect. Policy instruments include public provision of LTC as well as a subsidy on private insurance. The subsidy scheme may be linear or nonlinear. For the linear part we...