Kilauea volcano is the largest stationary source of SO2 pollution in the United States of America. Moreover, the SO2 that the volcano emits eventually forms particulate matter, another major pollutant. We use this exogenous source of pollution variation to estimate the impact of particulate...

We use hedonic prices and purchase quantities to consider what can be learned about household willingness to pay for baskets of organic products and how this varies across households. We use rich scanner data on food purchases by a large number of households to compute household specific lower...

We use the Euler equation to put forward a back-on-the-envelope rule for the global carbon tax based on a two-box carbon cycle with temperature lag, and a constant elasticity of marginal damages with respect to GDP. This tax falls with time impatience and intergenerational inequality aversion...

Climate change must deal with two market failures, global warming and learning by doing in renewable use. The social optimum requires an aggressive renewables subsidy in the near term and a gradually rising carbon tax which falls in long run. As a result, more renewables are used relative to...

This paper examines the role of the burden of proof (BoP) in National Treatment (NT) disputes under trade agreements. In the situation under study, imports may cause environmental damage, in which case less favorable treatment of imported products may be globally desirable from an international...

This paper develops a model of trade and CO2 emissions with heterogenous firms, where firms make abatement investments and thereby have an impact on their level of emissions. The model shows that investments in abatements are positively related to firm productivity and firm exports. Emission...

What should be the West's top priority for climate-change policy? This article is a revised and updated version of my talk to the Potsdam Global Sustainability Symposium (which drafted the Potsdam Declaration presented to the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference in Bali).

Combining unique data bases on emissions with sectoral output and employment data, we study the sources of the fall in world-wide SO2 emissions and estimate the impact of trade on emissions. Contrarily to concerns raised by environmentalists, an emission-decomposition exercise shows that scale...

The outcome of the 15th conference of the Parties to the UNFCC showed a shift from a top-down approach with a collective target favoring environmental objectives to a bottom-up accord favoring political feasibility with no meaningful binding agreement in sight as the global climate regime and...

The latest round of international negotiations in Copenhagen led to a set of commitments on emission reduction which are unlikely to stabilise global warming below or around 2°C. As a consequence, in the absence of additional ambitious policy measures, adaptation will be needed to address...