The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative...

We analyze a repeated game in which countries are polluting as well as investing in technologies. While folk theorems point out that the first best can be sustained as a subgame-perfect equilibrium when the players are sufficiently patient, we derive the second best equilibrium when they are...

According to the model of HOEL (1991), a unilateral emissions abatement of a global pollutant leads to lower aggregated emissions in a game with a simultaneous decision protocol. Our experiment tests the Hoel model and examines the question of whether a leader can induce additional abatement of...

We construct a two-country model where pollution from production is transmitted across borders. Pollution abatement is undertaken sequentially by private producers and the public sector. We characterize the Nash optimal levels of the policy instruments in the two countries: emission taxes and...

"Prices versus quantities" (Weitzman 1974), a hugely influential paper, is widely cited (and taught) in current debates about the best policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The paper's criterion for ranking policies suggests that technological uncertainty favors taxes over cap and trade....

The objective of this paper is to critically assess the use simple rules for the social cost of carbon (SCC) employing a rudimentary form of the Ramsey rule. Two interrelated caveats apply. First, if climate change poses a serious problem, it is hard to justify an exogenous constant growth rate...

The loss of international competitiveness of domestic industries remains a key obstacle to the implementation of effective carbon prices in a world without harmonized climate policies. We analyze countries' non-cooperative choices of emissions taxes under imperfect competition and mobile...

The objective of this paper is to analyze whether successful environmental policies spread across geographical space. We examine the existence of such environmental spatial policy spillovers using the example of wastewater treatment in Mexican municipalities. Untreated wastewater is a key...