The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has been proposed as a means of reducing the costs of abating greenhouse gasses, and for assisting developing countries. Although the CDM offers apparent environmental benefits, in addition to benefiting both investors and developing country hosts, it has...

We compare the effects of environmental reform and harmonization in the short and the long run, under autarky and free trade. With trade, harmonization of policies, even if achieved by lowering standards in one country, can improve short run aggregate welfare and increase the likelihood of...

We study the situation where firms' actions contribute to a stock externality. The regulator and firms have asymmetric information about serially correlated (abatement) costs. With price-based policies such as taxes, the regulator learns about the evolution of both stock and costs. This ability...

We compare the advantages of targeting either the growing sector or the shrinking sector in an economy where migration occurs too slowly, and the government has only second-best policy instruments. If the government is able to make commitments, we show (in a special case) that it should target...

We use a North-South model with property right differences and resource dynamics to study the effects of trade on resource use and welfare. Autarky is likely to Pareto-dominate free trade in the long run when the environment is quite fragile, and the result is reversed when the environment is...

Increased population pressure and political decisions have led to more intensive agricultural practices in China. As in other regions of the world, these practices can damage natural capital. We use the Kalman filter and Chinese panel data to estimate an index of environmental productivity...

Non-strategic firms with rational expectations make investment and emissions decisions. The investment rule depends on firms' beliefs about future emissions policies. We compare emissions taxes and quotas when the (strategic) regulator and (nonstrategic) firms have asymmetric information about...

The use of a constant discount rate to study long-lived environmental problems such as global warming has two disadvantages: The prescribed policy is sensitive to the discount rate, and with moderate discount rates, large future damages have almost no effect on current decisions. Time-consistent...

Recent papers use sector-specific factor models with mobile labor to show that imperfect property rights can be a source of comparative advantage. In these models, weaker property rights to the specific factor in a sector attract the mobile factor and increase the country's comparative advantage...

If a durable-good monopoly can use either of two technologies whose properties are known to consumers, the monopoly uses only the technology with the lowest average cost at low levels of production. If consumers know only about technologies in use, the monopoly may use an inferior technology...