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...

We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolistic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...

Since July 2013, the EU and the US have been negotiating a preferential trade agreement (PTA), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We use a multi-country, multi-industry Ricardian trade model with national and international input-output linkages to quantify its potential...

We propose a new criterion which reflects both the concern for welfare (utility) and the concern for rights in the evaluation of economic development paths. The concern for rights is captured by a pre-ordering over combinations of thresholds (floors or ceilings on various quantitative...

Sustainability and efficiency are potentially conflicting social objectives in natural resource management. We propose a market mechanism to allocate use rights over a stochastic resource to private managers. The mechanism endogenously determines the maximal tenure length guaranteeing that the...

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...

Itaya et al. (2014) study the conditions for sustainability and stability of capital tax coordination in a repeated game model with tax-revenue maximizing governments. One of their major results is that the grand tax coalition is never stable and sustainable. The purpose of this note is to prove...

This paper analyzes the impact of demographic aging on capital accumulation and welfare in economies with unfunded pensions. Using a two-period overlapping generation model with potentially endogenous retirement decisions, it shows that both the type of aging, i.e. declining fertility or...

When confronted with market weaknesses and failures determining sustainability problems for environmental common-pool resources, economic analysis has proposed government intervention as the only alternative available. Elinor Ostrom showed that this dichotomy between market and government is not...

A central issue in the study of sustainable development is the interplay of growth and sacrifice in a dynamic economy. This paper investigates the relationship among current consumption, sacrifice, and sustainability improvement in a general context and in two canonical, stylized economies. We...