Uncertainty plays a key role in the economics of climate change, and the discussions surrounding its implications for climate policy are far from settled. We give an overview of the literature on uncertainty in integrated assessment models of climate change and identify some future research...

Greenhouse gas policies confront the trade-off between the costs of reducing emissions and the benefits of avoided climate change. The risk of uncertain and potentially irreversible catastrophes is an important issue related to the latter, and one that has not yet been well incorporated into...

In this paper, we provide a real options model framing prosumers’ investment in photovoltaic plants. This is presented in a Smart Grid context where the exchange of energy among prosumers is possible. We determine the optimal size of the photovoltaic installations based on the influence the...

Climate change is a phenomenon beset with major uncertainties and researchers should include them in Integrated Assessment Models. However, including further dimensions in IAM models comes at a cost. In particular, it makes most of these models suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In this...

This paper contributes to the normative literature on mitigation and adaptation by framing the question of their optimal policy balance in the context of catastrophic climate risk. The analysis uses the WITCH integrated assessment model with a module that models the endogenous risk of...

In this paper stochastic dynamic programming is used to investigate habitat conservation by a multitude of landholders under uncertainty about the value of environmental services and irreversible development. We study land conversion under competition on the market for agricultural products when...

Nowadays, as stressed by important strategic documents like for instance the 2009 EU White Paper on Adaptation or the recent 2009 “Copenhagen Accord”, it is amply recognized that both mitigation and adaptation strategies are necessary to combat climate change. This paper enriches the rapidly...

This paper studies the empirical relationship between consumption and saving under two different sources of uncertainty: financial risk and environmental risk. The analysis is carried out using time series data for six advanced economies in the period 1965-2007. The results support the...

This paper empirically estimates a micro-founded model which studies the macroeconomic impact of environmental and financial risks on consumption choices in the Mediterranean Region. The analysis is carried out using time series aggregate data for fourteen Mediterranean countries over the period...

We use data from a survey of residents of five Italian cities conducted in late Spring 2004 to estimate the discount rates implicit in (a) money v. future risk reductions and (b) money v. money tradeoffs. We find that the mean personal discount rate is 2% in (a) and 8.7% in (b). The latter is...