This paper surveys the recent literature on the political economy of the formation of international environmental agreements. The survey covers theoretical modelling approaches and empirical studies including experimental work. Central to our survey is the question how the political process...

This paper is about the impact of international climate policy on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction. We focus on the time before the official GHG emission reduction phase according to Kyoto (before 2008) and the hard and soft law elements of the agreement. We find that expectations on...

We analyze the effect of “milestones” on reaching a long-term target, which if missed implies dramatic payoff risks. In our experiment, a cumulative threshold public goods game, milestones are captured by intermediate contribution targets on the way to the final target. Missing the final...