Achieving efficiency for many global environmental problems requires voluntary cooperation among sovereign countries due to the public good nature of pollution abatement. The theory of international environmental agreements (IEAs) in economics seeks to understand how cooperation among countries...

Why cooperation occurs when noncooperation appears to be individually rational has been an issue in economics for at least a half century. In the 1960's and 1970's the context was cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game; in the 1980's concern shifted to voluntary provision of public goods; in...

This paper develops a simple model of a polluting industry and an innovating firm. The polluting industry is faced with regulation and costly abatement. Regulation may be taxes or marketable permits. The innovating firm invests in R&D and develops technologies which reduce the cost of pollution...

This paper illustrates the major issues influencing interaction between environmental regulation and international trade by reviewing the empirical studies and theoretical results of the last 20 years. The second section of the paper discusses how environmental regulation distorts comparative...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is broadly viewed as the world’s most legitimate scientific assessment body that periodically assesses the economics of climate change (among many other topics) for policy audiences. However, growing procedural inefficiencies and limitations...

Economics has played an increasingly important role in shaping policy, in the United States and elsewhere. This paper reviews some of the dimensions of the economic approach to analyzing, understanding, and developing solutions to the problem of climate change. We then turn to the issue of...

Learning-i.e. the acquisition of new information that leads to changes in our assessment of uncertainty-plays a prominent role in the international climate policy debate. For example, the view that we should postpone actions until we know more continues to be influential. The latest work on...

On February 18-20, 2015, twenty-four experts gathered in Berlin to explore approaches to improving the process by which research on climate change is assessed -- with a focus on the social-sciences (economics, political science, policy studies). The workshop was sponsored by the Fondazione Eni...

Using data from the manufacturing sectors in the United States, Canada and France, we distinguish the energy efficiency and productivity impacts of embodied and unembodied technological progress. We find that technological progress embodied in new equipment is responsible for a surprisingly...