With the expiration of many tax cuts and unmet climate targets, 2025 could be a crucial year for climate policy in the United States. Using an integrated model of energy supply and demand, this paper aims to assess climate policies that the U.S. federal government may consider in 2025 and to...

There are often conflicts between proponents of trade and environmental activists. This paper shows, however, how trade agreements can be designed so as to motivate environmental conservation. I first analyze a standard trade model, where resource exploitation (e.g., deforestation) is a...

The world has pledged to protect 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030 to halt the rapid deterioration of critical ecosystems. We summarize the state of knowledge about the impacts of protected area policies, with a focus on deforestation and vegetation cover. We discuss critical issues...

We introduce an empirical framework for valuing markets in environmental offsets. Using newly-collected data on wetland conservation and offsets, we apply this framework to evaluate a set of decentralized markets in Florida, where land developers purchase offsets from a small number of...

We study how environmentally-inclined politicians (EIPs), i.e., politicians with prior environment-related working experience, affect local environmental performance in China. Firms located in cities with EIPs have lower levels of sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions. The effect is attenuated when the...

I study how policymakers can access and act on the information about climate change damages that is dispersed throughout the economy. I analyze a new dynamic deposit-refund instrument (called "carbon shares") that I show can: i) efficiently price emissions conditional on information, ii)...

We study how the implementation of emissions trading systems (ETS) impacts emissions reductions and the usage of renewable energy using a panel sample of the largest 100 countries worldwide. Exploiting the cross-country variations in ETS implementations, we show that ETS adoption materially...

As billions of people in the developing world seek to increase their living standards, their aspirations pose a challenge to global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The emerging middle class are buying and operating energy intensive durables ranging from vehicles to air conditioners to...

The economic effects of climate change vary across both time and space. To study these effects, this paper builds a global economy-climate model featuring a high degree of geographic resolution. Carbon emissions from the use of energy in production increase the Earth's (average) temperature and...