Government policies that are not intended to address environmental concerns can nonetheless distort prices and affect firms' emissions. We present an analytical general equilibrium model to study the effect of distortionary subsidies on factor prices and on environmental outcomes. We model an...

Prior research demonstrates that mortality rates increase during economic booms and decrease during economic busts, but little analysis has been conducted investigating the role of environmental risks as potential mechanisms for this relationship. We investigate the contribution of air pollution...

Environmental economics has traditionally fallen in the domain of microeconomics, but recently approaches from macroeconomics have been applied to studying environmental policy. We focus on two macroeconomic tools and their application to environmental economics. First, real business cycle...

How should environmental policy respond to economic fluctuations caused by persistent productivity shocks? This paper answers that question using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium real business cycle model that includes a pollution externality. I first estimate the relationship between...

This paper explores the relationship between time preferences, economic incentives, and body mass index (BMI). Using data from the 2006 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we first show that greater impatience increases BMI and the likelihood of obesity even after controlling for demographic,...

Empirical evidence suggests that individual choices often display behavioral anomalies, like time-inconsistent preferences. For example, a household's preferences at the time of purchase of energy-intensive durable goods like cars and appliances may differ from its preferences later on,...

A “fire sale” occurs when the owner of a good offers it for sale at a price strictly below the price that some buyers would willingly pay for the good. He does so because the advantage of the quick sale made possible by the lower price outweighs the higher price that other potential buyers...

In this paper we derive conditions under which optimal tax rates for addictive goods exceed tax rates for non-addictive consumption goods in an environment where exogenous government spending cannot be nanced with lump sum taxes. Standard static models that consider revenue raising and...

We study stabilization targets: common environmental policy recommendations that specify a maximum probability of an environmental variable exceeding a fixed target (e.g. limit climate change to at most 2°C above preindustrial). Previous work generally considers stabilization targets under...

We consider a two period model of optimal regulation of a firm subject to marginal compliance cost shocks. The regulator faces an asymmetric information problem: the firm knows current compliance costs, but the regulator does not. Both the regulator and the firm are uncertain about future costs....