This paper studies the formation of self-enforcing global environmental agreements in a world economy with international trade and two groups of countries that differ with respect to fuel demand and environmental damage. It investigates whether the signatories’ threat to embargo (potential)...

In the basic model of international environmental agreements (IEAs) (Barrett 1994, Rubio and Ulph 2006) extended by international trade, self-enforcing - or stable - IEAs may comprise up to 60% of all countries (Eichner and Pethig 2013). But these IEAs reduce total emissions only slightly...

A small open economy produces a consumer good, green and black energy, and imports fossil fuel at an uncertain price. Unregulated competitive markets are shown to be inefficient. The implied market failures are due to the agents' attitudes toward risk, to risk shifting and the uniform price for...

The mix of public and private research funding investments in alternative energy presents a challenge for isolating the effect of government R&D funding. Factors such as energy prices and environmental policy influence both private and public R&D decisions. Moreover, because government R&D is...

Global climate change and other environmental challenges require the development of new energy technologies with lower emissions. In the near-term, R&D investments, either by government or the private sector, can bring down the costs of these lower emission technologies. However, the results of...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a project-based carbon trade mechanism that subsidizes the users of climate-friendly technologies and encourages technology transfer. The CDM has provided financial support for a large share of Chinese wind projects since 2002. Using pooled...

Encouraging innovation is an important part of environmental policy. A large literature in environmental economics examines the links between environmental policy and innovation. This paper reviews recent literature on green innovation. I highlight major trends in the literature, including an...

After a boom and bust cycle in the early 2010s, venture capital (VC) investments are, once again, flowing towards green businesses. In this paper, we use Crunchbase data on 150,000 US startups founded between 2000 and 2020 to better understand why VC initially did not prove successful in funding...

The costs of low-carbon energy fell dramatically over the past decade, leading to rapid growth in its deployment. However, many challenges remain to deploy low-carbon energy at a scale necessary to meet net zero carbon emission targets. We argue that developing complementary technologies and...

This paper explores cost-effective low-carbon R&D and capital investment portfolios for the electricity generation sector through 2060. We present a novel method for long-term planning by combining an economic model of endogenous non-linear technical change and a generation capacity planning...