We examine how Green governments influence macroeconomic, education, and environmental outcomes. We exploit that the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan gave rise to an unanticipated change in government in the German state Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2011. Using the synthetic control method, we find...

Macroeconomics deals with economics at the aggregate level. This could be at a national level or the interaction between nations. Production of output necessarily involves pollution and degrading the environment. Therefore, environmental issues enter inevitably. Some problems that have been...

How was the birth of "Environmental Economics" related to the first Earth Day fifty years ago (April 22, 1970)? This short note introduces some ideas about an amazing burst of intellectual activity from 1968 to 1974. Environmental economics was not a field of economics before this brief period,...

A simple integrated assessment framework that gives rules for the optimal carbon price, transition to the carbon-free era and stranded carbon assets is presented, which highlights the ethical, economic, geophysical and political drivers of optimal climate policy. For the ethics we discuss the...

The extent of future climate change is a policy choice. Using an integrated climate-economy assessment model, we estimate climate policy curves (CPCs) that link the price of carbon dioxide (CO2) to subsequent global temperatures. The resulting downward sloping CPCs quantify the inverse...

Preserving environmental quality and addressing economic inequality both feature prominently in public discourse. Neither of these two issues can be fully understood in isolation, and policies aiming at one issue will increasingly have to consider interactions with the other. We synthesize...

Are natural resources a 'curse' or a 'blessing'? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource...

Model uncertainty is inherent in the design of optimal environmental policy. We investigate the consequences in a simple linear model, where the aim of the policymaker is to stabilize the carbon content of the atmosphere. We study how decision-makers' concerns about robustness alter policy using...

We focus in this paper on the effects of court errors on the optimal sharing of liability between firms and financiers, as an environmental policy instrument. Using a structural model of the interactions between firms, financial institutions, governments and courts we show, through numerical...