This paper develops sufficient conditions under which the Weak Green Paradox may (and may not) hold in terms of subsidies for biofuel production such that the supply-side responses by fossil fuel producers may more than offset the substitution to biofuels. Analytical results are derived and...

Future market developments determine the fate of fossil fuel carbon currently conserved unilaterally. Dynamic fuel depletion naturally suggests leakage rates approaching 100%. Reasons for lower leakage differ from what limits rates in previous studies. Discounting reduces present-value leakage...

This paper analyses for 34 OECD countries the extent to which the calculation of aggregate multi-factor productivity (MFP) is sensitive to alternative parameterisations. The starting point is the definition of MFP used in previous work in the OECD's Economics Department (e.g. Johansson et al....

Scores in standardized international student achievement tests and some recent adult literacy studies provide interesting data on the quality of educational outputs and on the skill level of the population that can be a useful complement to the data on the quantity of schooling which have been...

This paper provides a new measure of human capital using PISA and PIAAC surveys, and mean years of schooling. The new measure is a cohort-weighted average of past PISA scores (representing the quality of education) of the working age population and the corresponding mean years of schooling...

Empirical research on the drivers of multi-factor productivity (MFP) is abundant at the firm- and industry level but surprisingly little research has been conducted on the determinants of MFP at the macroeconomic level. In this paper, we seek to understand the drivers of country-level MFP with a...

How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according...

The Green Paradox states that, in the absence of a tax on CO2 emissions, subsidizing a renewable backstop such as solar or wind energy brings forward the date at which fossil fuels become exhausted and consequently global warming is aggravated. We shed light on this issue by solving a model of...

If investors fear that future carbon taxes will be lower than currently announced by policy makers, long-run investments in greenhouse gas mitigation may be smaller than desirable. On the other hand, owners of a non-renewable carbon resource that underestimate future carbon taxes will postpone...