The paper derives the optimal carbon tax in closed-form from an integrated assessment of climate change. The formula shows how carbon, temperature, and economic dynamics quantify the optimal mitigation effort. The model's descriptive power is comparable to numeric models used in policy advising....

This paper discusses techniques for measuring the incidence of carbon taxes across different household income groups and provides some cross-country estimates of these effects for selected advanced countries. The general message of this paper is that distributional concerns should not...

The economics of climate change involves a vast array of uncertainties, complicating both the analysis and development of climate policy. This study presents the results of the first comprehensive study of uncertainty in climate change using multiple integrated assessment models. The study looks...

In this paper we use the Hodrick-Prescott filter for analysing global temperature data. We are especially concerned with a reliable estimation of the trend component at the end of the data sample. To this end we employ time-varying values for the penalization parameter. The optimal values are...

This paper explains how, in the context of incomplete coordination among all countries, unilateral policies that might at first sight seem pro-green could actually turn out to harm the global environment. The free-riding motives and the difficulty of reaching an effective international...

The green paradox conveys the idea that climate policies may have unintended side effects when taking into account the reaction of fossil fuel suppliers. In particular, carbon taxes that will be implemented in the future induce resource owners to extract more rapidly which increases present...

Recent theoretical work in the economics of climate change has suggested that climate policy is highly sensitive to "fat-tailed" risks of catastrophic outcomes (Weitzman, 2009b). Such risks are suggested to be an inevitable consequence of scientific uncertainty about the effects of increased...

This paper contributes to the green paradox literature by using a resource extraction framework with heterogeneous energy sources. A key feature of the model is a capacity constrained green backstop resource, which implies the simultaneous use of the expensive backstop resource and the cheaper...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a project-based carbon trade mechanism that subsidizes the users of climate-friendly technologies and encourages technology transfer. The CDM has provided financial support for a large share of Chinese wind projects since 2002. Using pooled...

This research estimates the impact of climate on European agriculture using a continental scale Ricardian analysis. Climate, soil, geography and regional socio-economic variables are matched with farm level data from 37,612 farms across Western Europe. We demonstrate that a median quantile...