The social rate of discount is a crucial driver of the social cost of carbon (SCC), i.e. the expected present discounted value of marginal damages resulting from emitting one ton of carbon today. Policy makers should set carbon prices to the SCC using a carbon tax or a competitive permits...

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...

Interest rates are central determinants of saving and investment decisions. Costly financial intermediation distort these price signals by creating a spread between the interest rates on deposits and loans with substantial effects on the supply of funds and the demand for credit. This study...

We study how public policies affects an economy where production emits pollutants and investment in productive assets raises the economy's overall productivity. We explore two hypotheses about how the accumulation of pollutants affects human well-being. Under the first one, there is no limit to...

This paper first reviews the conceptual case for, and appropriate design of, fiscal policies to address major externalities associated with energy use - global warming, local air pollution, and various side effects (e.g., congestion) from motor vehicles. Techniques for (roughly) estimating the...

This paper takes the policy failure in establishing a global carbon price for efficient emissions reduction as a starting point and analyzes to what extent technology policies can be a reasonable second-best approach. From a supply-side perspective, carbon capture and storage (CCS) policies...

France has a very ambitious environmental-policy agenda, aimed chiefly at cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also at dealing with local air and water pollution, waste management and the conservation of biodiversity. The laws that followed the Grenelle de l'environnement encompass policy...

We develop a dynamic regulation game for a stock externality under asymmetric information and future market uncertainty. Within this framework, regulation is characterized as the implementation of a welfare-maximization program conditional on informational constraints. We identify the most...

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...

Denmark has a highly ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 70 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. While there is general agreement that carbon pricing should be the centerpiece of Denmark’s mitigation strategy, pricing needs to be effective, address equity and leakage concerns,...