This paper develops a model with an endogenous number of cities to explore whether local governments establish the optimal city size when key activities in the city are associated with emissions that harm consumers. In contrast to extant research, our model is fully micro-founded with respect to...

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...

We study the importance of uncertainty and public finance to the welfare ranking of three environmental policy instruments: pollution taxes, pollution permits and Kyoto-like numerical rules for emissions. The setup is the basic stochastic neoclassical growth model augmented with the assumptions...

Environmental protection is one of Europe's key values. The EU has set clear policy objectives to achieve its environmental goals. The EU has favoured market-based instruments, among which fiscal instruments to tackle the climate change problem. This paper takes a policy-making perspective and...

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 loss of international competitiveness of domestic industries remains a key obstacle to the implementation of effective carbon prices in a world without harmonized climate policies. We analyze countries’ non-cooperative choices of emissions taxes under imperfect competition and mobile...

Is green consumerism beneficial to the environment and the economy? To shed light on this question, we study the political economy of environmental regulations in a model with neutral and green consumers where the latter derive some warm glow from buying a good of higher environmental quality...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of a unilateral change in an emissions tax in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms. We find a positive effect of tighter environmental policy on average productivity in the reforming country through reallocation of labour towards exporting...

We develop a spatial equilibrium model to evaluate the efficiency and distributional impacts of the leading air quality regulation in the United States: the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). We link our economic model to an integrated assessment model for air pollutants which...