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...

We study how public policies affects an economy where production emits pollutants and investment in productive assets raises the economy’s overall productivity. We explore two hypotheses about how the accumulation of pollutants affects human well-being. Under the first one, there is no limit...

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...

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 social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using...

This paper presents a novel way to disentangle inequality aversion over time from inequality aversion between regions in the computation of the Social Cost of Carbon. Our approach nests a standard efficiency based Social Cost of Carbon estimate and an equity weighted Social Cost of Carbon...

We model countries' choice of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a dynamic game. Emissions generate immediate benefits to the emitting country but also increase atmospheric GHG concentrations that negatively affect present and future welfare of all countries. Because there are no international...

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...

I build a quantitative model of economic growth that can be used to evaluate the impact of environmental policy interventions on final-use energy consumption, an important driver of carbon emissions. In the model, energy demand is driven by directed technical change. Energy supply is subject to...

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are changing the energy balance of our planet. Various climatic feedbacks make the resulting warming over the next decades and centuries highly uncertain. We quantify how this uncertainty changes the optimal carbon tax in a stochastic dynamic programming...