This paper postulates the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic “World Climate Assembly” (WCA) that votes for a single worldwide price on carbon emissions via the basic democratic principle of one-person one-vote majority rule. If this WCA framework can be accepted in the first place,...

It is difficult to resolve the global warming free-rider externality problem by negotiating many different quantity targets. By contrast, negotiating a single internationally-binding minimum carbon price (the proceeds from which are domestically retained) counters self-interest by incentivizing...

This paper postulates the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic "World Climate Assembly" (WCA) that votes for a single worldwide price on carbon emissions via the basic democratic principle of one-person one-vote majority rule. If this WCA framework can be accepted in the first place,...

A critical issue in climate-change economics is the specification of the so-called "damages function" and its interaction with the unknown uncertainty of catastrophic outcomes. This paper asks how much we might be misled by our economic assessment of climate change when we employ a conventional...

Using climate change as a prototype motivating example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low-probability high-impact catastrophes. The paper shows that having an uncertain multiplicative parameter, which scales or amplifies exogenous shocks and...

This paper examines the impact of temperature changes on rural-urban migration using a 56km×56km grid cell level dataset covering the whole world at 10-year frequency during the period 1970-2000. We find that rising temperatures reduce rural-urban migration in poor countries and increase such...

It is not immediately clear how to discount distant-future events, like climate change, when the distant-future discount rate itself is uncertain. The so-called “Weitzman-Gollier puzzle” is the fact that two seemingly symmetric and equally plausible ways of dealing with uncertain future...

This paper examines the impact of temperature changes on rural-urban migration using a 56km×56km grid cell level dataset covering the whole world at 10-year frequency during the period 1970-2000. We find that rising temperatures reduce rural-urban migration in poor countries and increase such...

Using climate change as a prototype motivating example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low-probability high-impact catastrophes. The paper shows that having an uncertain multiplicative parameter, which scales or amplifies exogenous shocks and...

Linkage of cap-and-trade systems is typically advocated by economists on a general analogy with the beneficial linking of free-trade areas and on the specific grounds that linkage will ensure cost effectiveness among the linked jurisdictions. An appropriate and widely accepted specification for...