Regulations (such as pollution standards) are frequently expressed as a uniform ratio between a target variable and a base variable. The efficient form of such regulations is firm-specific. When firms are very different in size, large firms typically should face a relatively more stringent...

Annual global CO2 emission forecasts at 2100 span 10 to 40 billion tonnes. Modeling work over the past decade has not narrowed this range nor provided much guidance about probabilities. We examine the time-series properties of historical per capita CO2 emissions and conclude that per capita...

This paper argues that policies based on economic instruments are preferable to command and control approaches for effectively protecting biological diversity. This is due to sources of inefficiencies because of informational asymmetries between the regulator and private land users. We propose a...

This timely Handbook reviews many key issues in the economics of energy and climate change, raising new questions and offering solutions that might help to minimize the threat of energy-induced climate change.

The debate over whether urbanization and related socioeconomic developments affect large-scale surface climate trends is stalemated with incommensurable arguments. Each side can appeal to supporting evidence based on statistical models that do not overlap, yielding inferences that merely...

type="main" xml:id="rssa12036-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Malaria has disappeared in some countries but not others, and an explanation for the pattern remains elusive. We show that the probability of eradication of malaria jumps sharply when average household size drops below four people. Part of the...</p>

The Weitzman Dismal Theorem (DT) suggests agents today should be willing to pay an unbounded amount to insure against fat-tailed risks of catastrophes such as climate change. The DT has been criticized for its assumption that marginal utility (MU) goes to negative infinite faster than the rate...

Inducing farmers to adopt alternative, more environmentally friendly production practices has been attempted in a variety of ways ranging from moral suasion to direct regulation to economic instruments. Among the most common instruments are voluntary cost-share programs that involve taxpayers...