Shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) are perhaps the most influential economic policy analyses today. My paper evaluates their development, natural associations, logical consequences, and economic identification. All five SSP baseline scenarios are predicting scenarios that historical...

We investigate the short- and long-term effects of a natural gas boom in an economy where energy can be produced with coal, natural gas, or clean sources and the direction of technology is endogenous. In the short run, a natural gas boom reduces carbon emissions by inducing substitution away...

Moving beyond the combination of adoption subsidies, standards, and (albeit limited) attempts at carbon pricing that largely characterized U.S. climate policy over the last decade, recent climate-related legislation has transformed not only the scale of U.S. climate activities but also the...

Current policies directed at mitigating global warming appear unlikely to prevent temperatures from rising to levels that would trigger a precipitous increase in the costs of climate change. Various attempts at international cooperation to avoid this outcome have failed. Why is this problem so...

Climate change is generating demonstrable harm around the world. Political and legal efforts have sought to associate climate impacts with specific emissions, including in recent international policy discussion of Loss and Damage (L&D). However, no quantitative definition of L&D exists, nor does...

This paper provides a primer on the economics of environmental innovation. Our intention is not to write a pure review paper, but to also provide an up-to-date textbook treatment on the issue. Thus, we start by defining the marginal costs of both emissions and of emissions abatement. We then...

If further decarbonization of electricity systems is to continue, a next generation of innovation in transformative grid modernization and renewables integration technologies will be needed. Few studies have investigated the policy determinants of innovation in this sector to glean insights on...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), which primarily provide consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback (RTF),...

We study how individual inventors respond to incentives to work on "clean" electricity technologies. Using natural gas price variation, we estimate output and entry elasticities of inventors and measure the medium-term impacts of a price increase mirroring the social cost of carbon. We find that...

We study the evolution of belief systems that suppress productive effort. These include concerns about the envy of others, beliefs in the importance of luck for success, disdain for competitive effort, and traditional beliefs in witchcraft. We show that such demotivating beliefs can evolve when...