We reassess the well-known "narrow-but-deep" versus "broad-but-shallow" trade-off in international environmental agreements (IEAs), taking into account the principal-agent relationship induced by the hierarchical structure of international policy. To this end, we expand the modest coalition...

We analyse a principal-agent relationship in the context of international climate policy. Principals in two countries first decide whether to merge domestic emission permit markets to an international market, then delegate the domestic permit supply to an agent. We find that principals select...

Sustainability and efficiency are potentially conflicting social objectives in natural resource management. We propose a market mechanism to allocate use rights over a stochastic resource to private managers. The mechanism endogenously determines the maximal tenure length guaranteeing that the...

We study adaptation to climate change in a federalist setting. To protect themselves against an increase in flood risk, regional governments choose among adaptation measures that vary with respect to their costs, the level of protection they offer, and the presence and nature of spillovers to...

The author analyzes the optimal investment in environmental protection in a model of an infinite series of non-overlapping hyperbolically discounting agents. He shows that without a commitment mechanism society is eventually stuck in a situation where all agents prefer further investment in the...

We reassess the well-known "narrow-but-deep" versus "broad-but-shallow" trade-off in international environmental agreements (IEAs), taking into account the principal-agent relationship induced by the hierarchical structure of international policy. To this end, we expand the modest coalition...