Unintended consequences of a pre-announced climate policy have been studied in a variety of situations. We show that early announcement of a carbon tax gives rise to a "Green-Paradox", in that it increases polluting emissions in the interim period (between announcement and actual...

Conventional wisdom argues that environmental policy is less costly if environmental policy induces the development of cleaner technologies. In contrast to this argument, we show that the cost of environmental policy (a reduction in emissions) may be larger with induced technical change than...

We analyze the efficiency of urbanization patterns in a stylized dynamic model of urban growth with three sectors of production. Pollution, as a force that discourages agglomeration, is caused by domestic production. We show that cities are too large and too few in number in uncoordinated...

While fossil energy dependency has declined and energy supply has grown in the postwar world economy, future resource scarcity could cast its shadow on world economic growth soon if energy markets are forward looking. We develop an endogenous growth model that reconciles the current aggregate...

The Reformation provided a powerful source of legitimacy for secularization of governance and enabled the regional authorities to change the institutional structure to eliminate the inefficiencies under the prevailing (Catholic) regime. We investigate this idea in a simple model of regime change...

Using a dynamic framework with strategic interactions, we study the management of a non-renewable natural resource when property rights are generally weak. Under generally weak property rights both the resource stock and the revenues from exploiting it are imperfectly protected, due to...

Discounting has to take account of ecosystem services in consumption and production. Previous literature focuses on the first aspect and shows the importance of the relative price effect, for given growth rates of consumption and ecosystem services. This paper focuses on intermediate ecosystem...

Projections of climate change damages based on climate-econometric estimates suggest that, without mitigation, global warming could reduce average global incomes by over 20% towards the end of the century (Burke et al., 2015). This figure significantly surpasses climate damages in Integrated...

Climate physics predicts that the intensity of natural disasters will increase in the future due to climate change. We present a stochastic model of a growing economy where natural disasters are multiple and random, with damages driven by the economy's polluting activity. We provide a...