The Conference of the Parties (COP) has proven a valuable outlet to advance the climate agenda. The combination of high media coverage, extremely high expectations set by influential environmentalists, and unanimity rules has, however, started to limit its effectiveness. Technical issues can...

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 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...

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...

Using Credit Default Swap spreads, we construct a forward-looking, market-implied carbon risk factor and show that carbon risk affects firms’ credit spread. The effect is larger for European than North American firms and varies substantially across industries, suggesting the market recognises...

The consensus view amongst economists is that carbon prices, in order to be effcient, must be the same across the globe. But when there are inefficiencies in the allocation of capital so that consumers in different countries face different discount rates, we show that efficient carbon prices...

The general equilibrium model developed by Golosov et al. (2014), GHKT for short, is modified to allow for additional negative impacts of global warming on utility and productivity growth, mean reversion in the ratio of climate damages to production, labour-augmenting technical progress, and...

We provide ex-post empirical analysis of the effects of climate policies on carbon dioxide emissions at the aggregate national level. Our results are based on a comprehensive database of 121 countries. As climate policies we examine carbon taxes and emissions trading systems (ETS), as well as...

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...