This paper explores details behind the phenomenal increase in global crude oil production over the last century and a half and the implications if that trend should be reversed. I document that a key feature of the growth in production has been exploitation of new geographic areas rather than...

This paper has two purposes. It introduces a direct approach to policy analysis in endogenous growth models - the q-theory approach - and uses this to illustrate several new openness-and-growth links that appear when we enrich the economic content of the early trade and growth models. The...

We document substantial within-country (cross-municipality) differences in incomes for a large number of countries in the Americas. A significant fraction of the within-country differences cannot be explained by observed human capital. We conjecture that the sources of within-country and...

We examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth (income and population) between 1960 and 1990. Our major findings are that income and population growth move together and both types of growth are (1) positively related to initial schooling, (2) negatively...

A conservation good, such as the rainforest, is a hostage: it is possessed by S who may prefer to consume it, but B receives a larger value from continued conservation. A range of prices would make trade mutually beneficial. So, why doesn't B purchase conservation, or the forest, from S? If this...

When studying solutions to long-term environmental problems such as climate change, it is important to consider the role that technological change may play. Nonetheless, to date few economic models of climate change explicitly model the link between policy and technological change. There is a...

Climate modelers have recognized the possibility of abrupt climate changes caused by a reorganization of the North Atlantic's current pattern (technically known as a thermohaline circulation collapse). This circulation system now warms north-western Europe and transports carbon dioxide to the...

This paper considers the evidence on real commodity prices over 160 years for 30 commodities representing 7.89 trillion USD worth of production in 2011. In so doing, it suggests and documents a complete typology of real commodity prices, comprising long-run trends, medium-run cycles, and...

I present a non-technical high-level review the concept of sustainability and the various approaches to quantifying it.

There is limited evidence of behavioral changes resulting from electricity information feedback. Using a randomized control trial from a New York apartment building, we study long-term effects of information feedback from “Modlet” in-home devices, which provide near-real-time plug-level...