Energy system and power market models refrain from distinguishing between private and social discount rates. We devise a strategy to account for diverging private and social discount rates in intertemporal optimization frameworks, resulting in an optimal carbon tax above the marginal damage when...

Current decarbonization policies neglect damages from local air pollutants. We analyze the trade-off between complementary taxation of carbon emissions and local air pollution. We quantify results for the European power market until 2050. Taxing only air pollution results in social cost of 5,890...

Economists often regard broad-based carbon pricing (whether in the form of a carbon tax or cap and trade) as the most efficient policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Relative to a narrower policy that exempts some emissions sources, a broader policy is often favored because it can exploit...

Can countries reduce their carbon emissions by changing the composition of consumption instead of, or in addition to, changing the underlying production technology? If so, what type of policy would be most effective? I contribute to answering these questions by introducing a novel dataset...

We discuss climate change and resource scarcity from the perspective of macroeconomic modeling and quantitative evaluation. Our focus is on climate change: we build a very simple “integrated assessment model,” ie, a model that integrates the global economy and the climate in a unified...

The authors propose a policy package of low-carbon growth stimulation through a steep increase in sustainable infrastructure, mobilizing sustainable finance, and adoption of carbon pricing to simultaneously achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.

The authors propose a policy package of low-carbon growth stimulation through a steep increase in sustainable infrastructure, mobilizing sustainable finance, and adoption of carbon pricing to simultaneously achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Energy and climate policies are usually seen as measures to internalize externalities. However, as a side effect, these policies redistribute wealth between consumers and producers, and within these groups. While redistribution is seldom the focus of the academic literature in energy economics,...

Economists across the political spectrum argue that a carbon tax is the most effective and economically efficient policy for addressing climate change. Voters, however, strongly oppose the carbon tax and instead favor “green” subsidies and command-and-control regulations. If carefully...

A formula is derived for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that takes account of intragenerational income inequality and its evolution with economic growth. The social discount rate (SDR) should be adjusted to account for intragenerational and intergenerational inequality aversion and for risk...