Researchers have utilized the fact that many states have term limits (as opposed to being eligible for re-election) for governors to determine how changes in electoral incentives alter state regulatory agency behavior. This paper asks whether these impacts spill over into private sector...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

This paper analyzes nature protection by a social planner under different "utilitarian" social welfare functions. For that purpose we construct an integrated model of the economy and the ecosystem with explicit consideration of nonhuman species and with competition between human and nonhuman...

In an integrated economy-ecosystem model humans choose their land use and leave the residual land as habitat for three species forming a food chain. The size of habitat determines the diversity and abundance of species. That biodiversity generates, in turn, a flow of ecosystem services with...

We consider a world economy, in which the global public good "biodiversity" is positively correlated with that share of land which is protected by land-use restrictions against the deterioration of habitats and ecosystems. The willingness-to-pay for biodiversity conservation is positive in...

The European Union designates 26% of its landmass as a protected area, limiting economic development to favor biodiversity. This paper uses the staggered introduction of protected-area policies between 1985 and 2020 to study the selection of land for protection and the causal effect of...

This policy note investigates whether the current level of public support to environment-friendly technologies is sufficient to allow European countries to respond to the multiple challenges posed by climate change and other environmental concerns. We first lay out the justifications for...

We borrow standard assumptions from the non-renewable-resource-taxation and from the directed-technical-change literatures, to take a full account of the incentives to perform R&D activities in a dirty-resource sector and in a clean-resource-substitute sector. We show that a gradual rise in the...

This paper explores how a principal with time-inconsistent preferences invests optimally in technology or capital. If the current principal prefers her future self to save more, she can increase current investments complementary to future savings and decrease investments in the strategic...