Contrasting with the 1929 great crisis, authorities intervened forcefully in 2008 to stop the disintegration of the financial system. Governments and central banks then sought to revise the prudential regulation in depth. It would be optimistic, however, to believe that prudential measures,...

Policymakers have good reasons to prefer capital-based policies - such as CAFE standards or feebates programs - over a carbon price. A carbon price minimizes the discounted cost of a climate policy, but may result in existing capital being under-utilized or scrapped before its scheduled...

We propose an ethical viewpoint based on the possibility of the realization of the worst-case scenario in order to reduce future generations risks in terms of discounting. Applied to the question of conservation of a renewable resource, we show that an economy, where the social planner takes...

This paper analyzes the double dividend and distributional issues within an overlapping generations models framework with involuntary unemployment. We characterize the necessary conditions for the obtention of a double dividend when the revenue of the environmental tax is recycled by a variation...

There are two main approaches for defining social welfare relations for an economy with infinite horizon. The first one is to consider the set of intertemporal utility streams generated by a general set of bounded consumptions and define a preference relation between them. This relation is...

We defend a methodology of discounting, for the evaluation of the long-term effects of climate policies, which relies on a social welfare objective, against the view that the market rate of return should be used for that purpose. We also show that in the long run, the discount rate for such...

We introduce public debt in a Ramsey model with heterogenous agents and a public spending externality affecting utility which is financed by income tax and public debt. We show that public debt considered as a fixed portion of GDP can have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect depending on some...

Some recent evidence on government finance statistics of European countries suggests that countries with public debt issues also show a low tax revenue-GDP ratio. In this paper we develop a small open economy model of endogenous growth in which the engine of growth is public spending. We assume...

Imposing some constraints on public debt is often justified regarding sustainability and stability issues. This is especially the case when the ratio of public debt over GDP is restricted to be constant. Using a Ramsey model, we show that such a constraint can however be a fundamental source of...

This article analyzes the consequences on capital accumulation and environmental quality of environmental policies financed by public debt. A public sector of pollution abatement is financed by a tax and/or public debt. We show that if the initial capital stock is high enough, the economy...