I present a stylized suspected-infected-recovered (SIR) model of COVID-19, with symptomatic versus asymptomatic patients, and social distancing intervention. The optimal suppress strategy has low-infection rates, enabling assumptions that support closed-form solutions. The model predicts high...

We consider a model of cake-eating with private information. The model captures phenomena such as trust and security of supply in resource-use relationships. It also predicts supply shocks as an equilibrium phenomenon: privately informed sellers have incentives to reveal resource scarcity too...

I define "generous sustainability" as a combination of two conditions: neither instantaneous maximin income nor attainable maximin income should decrease over time. I provide a formal definition and study applications to an AK economy, a Ramsey economy, and a Climate Economy. Generosity is shown...

Between 1950 and 2017, world average life expectancy increased from below-50 to above-70, while the fertility rate dropped from 5 to about 2.5. We develop and calibrate an analytic climate-economy model with overlapping generations to study the effect of such demographic change on capital...

Between 1997 and 2014, US corn, soybean and cotton production almost fully converted to genetically modified crops. Starting around 2007, improved tight oil and shale gas technologies turned the declining US fossil fuel production into a booming industry. We study the effects of these two...

We develop a 2-period emission trading model for a stock pollutant with demand shocks resolving over time. We find precise conditions for efficiency of a stabilization mechanism where cumulative available permits decrease with excess supply in early periods. Our model describes the stabilization...

Climate is a persistent asset, bar none: changes in climate-related stocks have consequences spanning over centuries or possibly millennia to the future. To reconcile the discounting of such far-distant impacts and realism of the shorter-term decisions, we consider hyperbolic time-preferences in...

For any emission trading system (ETS) with quantity-based endogenous supply of allowances, there exists a negative demand shock, e.g. induced by abatement policy, that increases aggregate supply and thus cumulative emissions. We prove this green paradox for a general model and then apply it to...

The historical increase in emissions is for one-fourth attributable to the growth of emissions per person, whereas three-fourths are due to population growth. This striking evidence is not represented in the majority of climate-economic studies, which mostly neglect the environmental...

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...