This article explores the principles that should guide efforts to raise finance for climate action in developing countries. The main conclusions are that, first, there is an important role for private finance, which would be facilitated by having pervasive and broadly uniform emissions pricing...

We construct two simple examples that help to clarify the role of a key assumption in the analysis of price or quantity controls of greenhouse gases in the presence of uncertain costs. Traditionally much has been made of the fact that greenhouse gases are a stock pollutant, and that therefore...

The paper analyses the implications of landowners’ option values in land allocation and derives policy recommendations for payments for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). Given that REDD will not represent a permanent change in the cumulative flux of carbon...

This paper develops a model of endogenous product selection by firms. The theory is motivated by new evidence we present on the importance of product switching by U.S. manufacturers. Two-thirds of continuing firms change their product mix every five years, and product switches involve more than...

We estimate the impacts of an energy tax – the Climate Change Levy (CCL) – on the manufacturing sector using panel data from the UK production census. Our identification strategy builds on the comparison of trends in outcomes between plants subject to the CCL and plants that were granted an...

Individuals and business owners engage in an increasingly complex array of financial decisions that are critical for their success and well-being. Yet a growing literature documents that in both developed and developing countries, a large fraction of the population is unprepared to make these...

This paper shows that increasing product market competition can have a direct impact on the employment relationship and on wage inequality. I develop a simple model in which an increase in product market competition increases returns to skill through the effect of competition on the sensitivity...

This paper centres around the question of ownership of firms and managerial competition and how these affect managers and employees’ incentives to invest in human capital. We argue that employees’ incentives in human capital investment are affected by both ownership and competition since...

At present the USA is - in per capita terms - the top greenhouse gas polluter among the world’s major economies. This is mirrored by the high energy intensity of all sectors of the US economy including manufacturing industries. A potential explanation for the higher energy intensity is lower...

The Wong-Viner Envelope Theorem on the equality of long-run and short-run marginal costs (LRMC and SRMC) is reformulated for convex but generally nondifferentiable cost functions. The marginal cost can be formalized as the multi-valued subdifferential a.k.a. the subgradient set but, in itself,...