We study the impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on the spread and severity of COVID-19 in Germany. We combine data on county-by-day level on confirmed cases and deaths with information on local air quality and weather conditions and exploit short-term variation in the...

Climate policies vary widely across countries, with some countries imposing stringent emissions policies and others doing very little. When climate policies vary across countries, energy-intensive industries have an incentive to relocate to places with few or no emissions restrictions, an effect...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...

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...

The historical increase in emissions is for one-fourth attributable to the growth of emissions per person, whereas three-fourths are due to population growth. This striking evidence is not represented in the majority of climate-economic studies, which mostly neglect the environmental...

We analyse optimal abatement and carbon pricing strategies under a variety of economic, temperature and damage risks. Economic growth, convex damages and temperature-dependent risks of climatic tipping points lead to higher growth rates of carbon prices, but gradual resolution of uncertainty...

Will a carbon tax improve the welfare consequences of policies to promote electric vehicles? This paper examines when a complementarity could exist between carbon pricing and high electric vehicle adoption. We analyze electricity generation in recent years to show that in several regions, carbon...

We analyse the economic impact of using carbon pricing revenue to fund the EU budget. Such a reform would redistribute from countries with above average carbon intensive production to less carbon intensive countries. Once the reform is implemented, the low carbon countries will prefer a lower...

Several European countries have decided to phase out coal power generation. Emissions from electricity generation are already regulated by the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), and in some countries like Germany the phaseout of coal will be accompanied with cancellation of emissions allowances....

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...