This paper assesses the role of the public sector in adaptation to climate change. We first offer a definition and categorization of climate change adaptation. We then consider the primary economic principles that can guide the assignment of adaptation tasks to either the private or the public...

Unlike produced commodities, the extraction and sale of oil or natural gas is an "asset swap": assets stored in the ground are converted into financial assets. The value of assets in the ground is reduced by the amount taken out and sold. This is important for assessing the coercive power of the...

When politicians negotiate in international climate conventions they may suffer from incomplete information about each other's preferences about reaching an agreement. As is known, this may cause failure to reach an efficient cooperative agreement. We study the role of the clean development...