We propose an overlapping generations economy where households care about relative consumption, the difference between their consumption and the consumption of their reference group. An individual's consumption is driven by the comparison of his lifetime income and the lifetime income of his...

We examine how adaptation to climate change affects the incentives to ratify international environmental agreements (IEAs). In particular, we study the effects of two aspects on the incentives to join a coalition. First, we analyze cross-country differences in adaptation costs. Second, we...

We consider the effect of an increase in the risk from pollution. We show that in the case of a flow pollution, when the number of players is sufficiently large, the result of Bramoulle and Treich, showing that a marginal increase of risk in the neighborhood of a risk-free world is...

In this paper, we consider an asymmetric polluting oligopoly: firms have different production costs, and their pollution characteristics may also be different. We will demonstrate that, in this case, optimal tax rates per unit of emission are not the same for all firms. We call this property...

There is a large literature on the optimal order of exploitation of natural resources. We explore the impact of specific technical progress that enables the saving of resource inputs in production on the order of exploitation. Models of growth tend to assume uniform and global technical progess....

We evaluate biodiversity in a real options framework, when the resources in use are substitutable. We examine optimal conservation decisions given that a biodiversity loss is irreversible and that future use values are uncertain. While species substitutability is generally believed to reduce the...

We study the optimal policies of research and development in the context of a resource-exploiting economy. We distinguish two cases: non-renewable resources and renewable resources. In the first case, we show that it is useful to construct an index of scarcity, which is the product of the level...

We show that when polluting firms are Cournot oligopolists, they may have an incentive to use the market of pollution permits as a means of indirectly coordinating their outputs. If firms are initially identical, trade in pollution permits may result in an asymmetric oligopoly. The case where...

We characterize optimal firm-specific emission tax rates, and optimal firm-specific emission standards, and provide intuitive explanation on differential treatments. We show that there is a unified framework for deriving firm-specific policy measures. When firms are identical, the optimal policy...

This paper distinguishes relative risk aversion and resistance to intertemporal substitution in climate risk modeling. Stochastic recursive preferences are introduced in a stylized numeric climate-economy model using preliminary IPCC 1998 scenarios. It shows that higher risk aversion increases...