Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a theory of this situation and shows when a small probability that some future government...

Real-world negotiations differ fundamentally from existing bargaining theory. Inspired by the Paris Agreement on climate change, this paper develops a novel bargaining game in which each party quanti.es its own contribution (to a public good, for example), before the set of pledges must be...

I develop a dynamic model of costly private provision of public goods where agents can also invest in cost-reducing technologies. Despite the n+1 stocks in the model, the analysis is tractable and the (Markov perfect) equilibrium unique. The framework is used to derive optimal incomplete...

A "conservation good" (such as a tropical forest) is owned by a seller who is tempted to consume (or cut), but a buyer benefits more from conservation. The seller does conserve if the buyer is expected to buy, but the buyer is unwilling to pay as long as the seller conserves. This contradiction...

Why do rational politicians choose inefficient policy instruments? Environmental regulation, for example, often takes the form of technology standards and quotas even when cost-effective Pigou taxes are available. To shed light on this puzzle, we present a stochastic game with multiple...

We analyze participation in international environmental agreements in a dynamic game in which countries pollute and invest in green technologies. If complete contracts are feasible, participants eliminate the holdup problem associated with their investments; however, most countries prefer to...