The transport sector is the only sector where carbon emissions continue to grow. This has led policy makers to propose ambitious policies to reduce emissions in the car sector, in particular fuel efficiency standards, portfolio mandates for Electric Vehicles and purchase taxes or subsidies. A...

This paper estimates the external costs of harmful alcohol use in the European Union (EU) and confronts them with the alcohol excise duty collections per adult and per litre of pure alcohol in the various Member States. In all but one Member State, drinkers do not appear to pay their way. This...

A formula is derived for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that takes account of intragenerational income inequality and its evolution with economic growth. The social discount rate (SDR) should be adjusted to account for intragenerational and intergenerational inequality aversion and for risk...

The objective of this paper is to critically assess the use of simple rules for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that employ a rudimentary form of the Ramsey Rule. Two interrelated caveats apply. First, if climate change poses a serious problem, it is hard to justify an exogenous constant growth...

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are changing the energy balance of our planet. Various climatic feedbacks make the resulting warming over the next decades and centuries highly uncertain. We quantify how this uncertainty changes the optimal carbon tax in a stochastic dynamic programming...

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...

We use perturbation methods to derive a rule for the optimal risk-adjusted social cost of carbon (SCC) that incorporates the effects of uncertainties associated with climate and the economy from a calibrated DSGE model. We allow for different aversions to risk and intertemporal fluctuations,...

This title discusses the phenomenon of alcohol abuse as a behavioural disease and the associated costs. The author details alcohol’s status as a psychoactive drug; he notes, however, that in contrast to other psychoactive drugs, alcohol has been widely culturally accepted in Western countries...

We derive the optimal unilateral policy in a general equilibrium model of trade and climate change where one region of the world imposes a climate policy and the rest of the world does not. A climate policy in one region shifts activities—extraction, production, and consumption—in the other...