Greenhouse gas policies confront the trade-off between the costs of reducing emissions and the benefits of avoided climate change. The risk of uncertain and potentially irreversible catastrophes is an important issue related to the latter, and one that has not yet been well incorporated into...

Interest rates are central determinants of saving and investment decisions. Costly financial intermediation distort these price signals by creating a spread between the interest rates on deposits and loans with substantial effects on the supply of funds and the demand for credit. This study...

We describe three essential elements of an effective post-2012 international global climate policy architecture: a means to ensure that key industrialized and developing nations are involved in differentiated but meaningful ways; an emphasis on an extended time path of targets; and inclusion of...

Climate skeptics argue that the possibility that global warming is exogenous implies that we should not take additional action towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions until we know more. However this paper shows that even climate skeptics have an incentive to reduce emissions: such a change of...

After twenty years of global negotiations, the world is still far from a comprehensive climate agreement. The 'top-down' approach embodied by the Kyoto Protocol has all but stalled, chiefly due to disagreements over levels of ambition and objections to financial transfers. To avoid those...

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...

Economic measures are advanced to environmental problems in EU nations. The economic approach imposes a constant economic load on activities negatively affecting the environment, and it is also a technique for giving a constant profit for activities conserving the environment. The whole society...

Using the Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel (2015) framework, we examine the nonlinear response effect of economic growth to historic temperature and precipitation fluctuations. We confirm that aside from the significant effect of rising temperature on agricultural production, industrial production and...

Economists have proposed a variety of sophisticated climate-change interventions. But do our citizens care enough about climate change to enact such policies? This paper provides evidence that suggests they do not. Two kinds of findings are presented. Using data on 40,000 Europeans from the 2016...

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 to...