A new and important concept in global warming economics and policy is the social cost of carbon or SCC. This concept represents the economic cost caused by an additional ton of carbon-dioxide emissions or its equivalent. The present study describes the development of the concept as well as its...

The United States Government recently concluded a year-long process to develop a range of values representing the monetized damages associated with an incremental increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, commonly referred to as the social cost of carbon (SCC). These values are currently used...

This paper postulates the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic “World Climate Assembly” (WCA) that votes for a single worldwide price on carbon emissions via the basic democratic principle of one-person one-vote majority rule. If this WCA framework can be accepted in the first place,...

An estimate of the social cost of carbon (SCC) is key to climate policy. But how should we estimate the SCC? A common approach is to use an integrated assessment model (IAM) to simulate time paths for the atmospheric CO2 concentration, its impact on global mean temperature, and the resulting...

We use the forward-looking information from the US and global capital markets to estimate the economic impact of global warming, specifically, long-run temperature shifts. We find that global warming carries a positive risk premium that increases with the level of temperature and that has almost...

This paper develops a theoretical foundation for the social cost of carbon (SCC). The model highlights the source of debate over whether countries should use the global or domestic SCC for regulatory impact analysis. I identify conditions under which a country's decision to internalize the...

We study climate change in a model with a carbon-intensive and a green sector, each subject to stochastic productivity shocks, and show how the underlying economic structure affects the risk-adjusted discount rate and the climate risk premium in the social cost of carbon (SCC). Consumption...

Extreme heat is the single best predictor of corn and soybean yields in the United States. While average yields have risen continuously since World War II, we find no evidence that relative tolerance to extreme heat has improved between 1950 and 2005. Climate change forecasts project a sharp...

Because of the global commons nature of climate change, international cooperation among nations will likely be necessary for meaningful action at the global level. At the same time, it will inevitably be up to the actions of sovereign nations to put in place policies that bring about meaningful...

The UNFCCC process of negotiating multilateral carbon emissions reductions thus far has focused on approximately equiproportional cuts in annual carbon emissions by country along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol agreement. But now, with the objective of involving large developing countries such...