We use recent developments in the empirics of comparative case studies to analyze the effect of binding emission targets under the Kyoto Protocol on the development of CO2 emissions of seven major Annex B countries. In particular, we investigate whether committing to a specific greenhouse gas...

We empirically analyze the formation of international environmental agreements within a political economy framework. We develop a theoretical model of state dependent net benefits of ratification predicting (i) strategic behavior with respect to the timing of ratification and (ii) that...

Mitigation and adaptation are the most important strategies in combating global climate change. It is expected that in a post Kyoto world industrialized countries have to engage in greenhouse gas abatement, and to support developing countries in adapting to climate change. Within the framework...

The prevailing literature discusses intergenerational trade-offs predominantly in infinitely-lived agent models despite the finite lifetime of individuals. We discuss these trade-offs in a continuous time OLG framework and relate the results to the infinitely-lived agent setting. We identify...

There is an ongoing discussion especially among political scientists and economists whether and how climate variability affects civil conflicts and wars in developing countries. Given the predicted climatic changes, several studies argue that increasing temperatures or decreasing precipitation...

Owing to the extensive critique of food-crop-based biofuels, attention and hopes have turned toward second-generation wood-based biofuels. An important question is therefore whether wood from boreal forests could serve as a source for biofuels. However, in a typical boreal forest, it takes...

Over the last half decade, a variety of federal legislative proposals for limiting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been put forward, most of which would set a price on carbon. As of early 2013, the one politically plausible policy appears to be a carbon tax, passed as part of a larger fiscal...

We examine a global refunding scheme for mitigating climate change. Countries pay an initial fee into a global fund that is invested in long-run assets. In each period, part of the fund is distributed among the participating countries in relation to the emission reductions they have achieved in...

Drawing on the method developed by Just and Pope (1978, 1979), this paper separately analyzes the marginal contributions of both regular input factors and climate factors to mean output and to production risk in Chinese inland aquaculture. Furthermore, the net change in output following a 1°C...

This paper employs the production function-based method proposed by Just and Pope (1978, 1979) to explicitly analyze production risk in the context of Chinese grain farming and climate change, and test for potential endogeneity of climate factors in Chinese grain production. Our results indicate...