With the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence, there are expectations for a proportional expansion of economic activity due to increased productivity, and with it energy consumption and its associated environmental consequences like carbon dioxide emissions. Here, we combine data on...

We investigate how irreversibility in "dirty" and "clean" capital stocks affects optimal climate policy, from both theoretical and numerical perspectives. An increasing carbon tax will reduce investments in assets that pollute, and so reduce emissions in the short term: our "irreversibility...

This paper introduces geoengineering into an optimal control model of climate change economics. Together with mitigation and adaptation, carbon and solar geoengineering span the universe of possible climate policies. Their wildly different characteristics have important implications for climate...

We study how public policies affects an economy where production emits pollutants and investment in productive assets raises the economy’s overall productivity. We explore two hypotheses about how the accumulation of pollutants affects human well-being. Under the first one, there is no limit...

This paper first reviews the conceptual case for, and appropriate design of, fiscal policies to address major externalities associated with energy use-global warming, local air pollution, and various side effects (e.g., congestion) from motor vehicles. Techniques for (roughly) estimating the...

We build a general equilibrium model to study how climate transition risks affect energy prices and the valuations of different firms in the energy sector. We consider two types of fossil fuel firms: incumbents that have developed oil reserves they can extract today or tomorrow, and new entrants...

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...

Growth theory predicts that natural disasters should, on impact, lower GDP per capita. However, the empirical literature does not offer conclusive evidence. Most existing studies use disaster data drawn from damage records of insurance companies. We argue that this may lead to estimation bias as...

We show that economies may exhibit a strong endogenous macroeconomic adaptation response to climate change. If climate change induces a structural change to the more productive sector, economies can benefit from climate change though productivities in both sectors are reduced. If climate change...

We analyze the impact of earthquakes on nighttime lights at a sub-national level, i.e. on grids of different size. We argue that existing studies on the impact of natural disasters on economic development have several important limitations, both at the level of the outcome variable - usually...