Are private voluntary environmental actions by firms a sign of mismanagement, or a profitable “win-win” replacement for regulation? Empirical evidence is decidedly mixed. In this study, we use 19 years of monthly stock price returns, from 1991 to 2009, to examine the profitability of...

The paper addresses the collision of two twenty-first Century transitions—the unprecedented change in the size, composition, density and distribution of the human population, and rapid change in the earth’s natural environment, in part a response to the above. It argues that it is important...

This paper provides an estimate of the contribution of the ecosystem to the provisioning services generated by agriculture. This is achieved by valuing the changes in productivity generated by a marginal alteration in ecosystem inputs. As an example, we consider the variation in rainfall and...

In this paper we argue that when a subgroup of countries cooperate on emission reduction, the optimal response of non-signatory countries reflects the interaction between three potentially opposing factors, the incentive to free-ride on the environmental benefits of cooperation, the incentive to...

Technology transfer plays a key role in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, we characterize the factors that promote or hinder the international diffusion of climate-friendly technologies using detailed patent data from 96 countries for the period 1995–2007. The...

Policy-makers have relied on non-coercive mechanisms to achieve socially preferred outcomes in a variety of contexts when prices fail to ration scarce resources. Amid heightened concern about environmental damage and climate change, public appeals for cooperation and pecuniary incentives are...

This paper estimates the damages from tropical cyclones (TCs) in the Southern Hemisphere under future climate change scenarios based on the historical TC records in Australia. From the best-track TC data, we examine the changes in frequency, intensity, and economic damage of the TCs that made...

We analyse the optimal design of climate change policies when a government wants to encourage the private sector to undertake significant immediate investment in developing cleaner technologies, but the relevant carbon taxes (or other environmental policies) that would incentivise such...

This paper uses a vote-counting procedure to estimate the probability density function of the total economic impact as a parabolic function of global warming. There is a wide range of uncertainty about the impact of climate change up to 3°C, and the information becomes progressively more...

We use a laboratory experiment to elicit discount rates over a 20-year time horizon using government savings bonds as a payment vehicle. When using a constant (exponential) discount rate function, we find an implied average discount rate of 4.9 %, which is much lower than has been found in...