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...

We consider information from many sciences bearing on the causes and consequences of climate change, focusing on lessons from past mass extinctions of life on Earth.  The increasing atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gases are now established, as is their source in human activity. ...

What is the optimal instrument design and choice for a regular attempting to control emissions by private agents in face of uncertainty arising from business cycles?  In applying Weitzman's result [Prices vs. quantities, Review of Economic Studies, 41 (1974), 477-491] to the problem of...

Africa is well endowed with potential for hydro and solar power, but its other endowments - shortages of capital, skills, and governance capacity - make most of the green options relatively expensive, while its abundance of hydro-carbons makes fossil fuels relatively cheap.  Current power...

Climate policy requires that much of the world's reserves of fossil fuels remain unburned.  This paper makes the case for implementing this directly through policy to close the global coal industry.  Coal is singled out because of its high emissions intensity, low rents per unit value, local...

The underlying motivations for envy or related social preferences and their impact on agricultural innovations are examined by combining data from money burning experimental game and household survey from Ethiopia.  In the first stage of the money burning experimental game, income inequality is...

Using data from experimental games and household survey from 1,200 married couples in three sites in Ethiopia, this paper uses different versions of a voluntary contribution mechanism to test for household efficiency.  The experimental and econometric analyses provide many interesting results...

Using data from a field experiment conducted in seventy Colombian municipalities, we investigate who pools risk with whom when risk pooling arrangements are not formally enforced.  We explore the roles played by risk attitudes and network connections both theoretically and empirically.  We...

Economists have traditionally assumed that individual behavior is motivated exclusively by extrinsic incentives.  Social physchologists, in contrast, stress that intrinsic motivations are also important.  In recent work, economic theorists have started to build psychological factors, like...

This paper describes and analyzes the results of a unique field experiment especially designed to test the effects of the level of commitment and information available to individuals when sharing risk.  We find that limiting exogenously provided commitment is associated with less risk sharing,...