The amount of CO2 embedded in trade has substantially increased over the last decades. We study the trends and some drivers of the carbon content of trade over the period 1995-2009. Our main findings are the following. First, the mix of traded goods tends to have higher emission intensity than...

In June 2018, an agreement between key EU institutions – the Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council – was reached after a long-lasting discourse over the 2030 EU climate and energy policy package. This paper offers a comprehensive assessment of the EU package, with its...

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...

If global warming is to stay below 2°C, there are four risks of assets stranding. First, substantial fossil fuel reserves will be stranded at the end of the fossil era. Second, this will be true for exploration capital too. Third, unanticipated changes in present or expected future climate...

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...

Policy makers in the EU and elsewhere are concerned that unilateral carbon pricing induces carbon leakage through relocation of emission-intensive and trade-exposed industries to other regions. A common measure to mitigate such leakage is to combine an emission trading system (ETS) with...

Finland introduced the planet's first carbon tax in 1990 to experiment with, to most economists, the best policy to reverse carbon emissions. I estimate the causal effect of taxing carbon on Finnish emissions using the Synthetic Control Approach. The results suggest that taxing carbon reduces...

We explore the possibility of achieving a cooperative outcome when governments act non-cooperatively in a strategic environmental policy model where emission permit markets are linked. We introduce a specific distribution scheme of the permit revenues between the exporting countries so as to...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...

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...