The paper derives the optimal carbon tax in closed-form from an integrated assessment of climate change. The formula shows how carbon, temperature, and economic dynamics quantify the optimal mitigation effort. The model’s descriptive power is comparable to numeric models used in policy...

The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative...

This paper explores how a principal with time-inconsistent preferences invests optimally in technology or capital. If the current principal prefers her future self to save more, she can increase current investments complementary to future savings and decrease investments in the strategic...

World income grows fast without verifiable climate-change impacts on the economy. The growth spell can end if climate impacts turn real but this can take decades to learn. We develop a tractable stochastic climate-economy model with a hidden-state impact process to evaluate the contributions of...

We propose and axiomatize probability adjusted rank-discounted critical-level generalized utilitarianism (PARDCLU). We thus generalize rank-discounted utilitarianism (RDU) (proposed by Zuber and Asheim, 2012) to variable population and risky situations and thereby take important steps towards...

We show how optimal saving in a two-period model is affected when prudence and risk aversion of the underlying utility function change. Increasing prudence alone will induce higher savings only if, for certain combinations of the interest rate and the pure time discount rate, there is...

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and countries, and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. We argue that such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of...

In July 2004, the Belgian government intensified monitoring within the Unemployment Insurance scheme. Workers claiming unemployment benefits for more than 13 months are notified that past job-search behavior will be monitored 8 months later. In one region the target group is counselled shortly...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Since July 2004 the job search effort of long-term unemployed benefit claimants is monitored in Belgium. We exploit the discontinuity in the treatment assignment at the age of 30 to evaluate the effect of a notification sent at least 8 months before job search is verified. The threat of...