We examine long-run treaties for mitigating climate change. Countries pay an initial fee into a global fund that is invested in long-run assets. In each period, part of the fund is distributed among the participating countries in relation to the emission reductions they have achieved in this...

European empires had two key economic aspects: the extraction of colonial wealth by colonizers, and the relevance of trade for the colonial economies. I build a simple model of decolonization that puts these two elements at centre stage. By controlling policy in the colony, the mother country...

In recent years, sustainability has represented one of the most important policy goals explored in the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature. But related hypotheses, performance measures and results continue to present a challenge. The present paper contributes to this ongoing literature...

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...

We use a 3-step analysis to assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU27. Firstly, we perform the SURADF specific panel unit root test to investigate the mean-reverting behaviour of general government expenditures and revenues ratios. Secondly, we apply the bootstrap panel...

This paper analyzes the impact of aging on capital accumulation and welfare in a country with a sizable unfunded social security system. Using a two-period overlapping generation model with potentially endogenous retirement decisions, the paper shows that the type of aging, i.e. declining...

Well-intended policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions may have unintended undesirable consequences. Recently, a large amount of literature has emerged showing under what conditions this so-called ‘Green Paradox' may occur. We review this literature and identify the key mechanisms...

Unilateral climate policy suffers from carbon leakage, i.e. the (partial) offset of the initial emission reduction by increases in other countries. Different than most typically discussed climate policies, degrowth not only aims at reducing the fossil fuel use in an economy, but rather at a...

In this paper we analyze the sustainability of public finances in the states (Laender) of the Federal Republic of Germany using an unprecedentedly comprehensive fiscal dataset for the time period from 1950 to 2011 for West German Laender and 1991 to 2011 for East German Laender, respectively. In...