Biodiversity is often adversely affected by human activities. This reduces social welfare but may be external to private economic decisions. Consequently, these external effects on biodiversity need to be considered explicitly in economic models, which is only partly reflected in the literature....

Robert S. Pindyck has made significant contributions to a wide and diverse range of economic literatures; summarizing them is challenging. To keep the length of this review manageable, I confine my discussion to four areas in which his contributions have been particularly notable: (i) economic...