In this paper we use Pindyck's model (2002) to show that the discount rate may play an important role in explaining for the income-pollution pattern observed in the real world. Low levels of income involve high values of discount rate, that are obstacles to the adoption of a pollution abatement...

Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...

For sufficiently low abatement costs many countries might undertake significant emission reductions even without any international agreement on emission reductions. We consider a situation where a coalition of countries does not cooperate on emission reductions but cooperates on the development...

We extend the WITCH model to consider the possibility to produce and trade electricity generated by large scale concentrated solar power plants in highly productive areas that are connected to the demand centres through High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) cables. We find that it becomes optimal...

We are interested in three related questions: (1) How should accounting prices be estimated? (2) How should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy? (3) How can we check whether intergenerational well-being will be sustained along a projected economic programme? We do not presume that...

Nutrient enrichment of marine ecosystems is regarded as a pressing global environmental problem. For certain marine species it may be a mixed blessing, resulting in damaging ecosystem events, but contributing to primary productivity. Consequently, the impact of enrichment on fishery profits may...

Strategies of international risk management, as the implementation of tradable emission permits, feed back to the incentive structure of a treaty, like the Kyoto Protocol. Discussing the Kyoto Protocol the question was: Should there be any restrictions on the trading of emission permits or not?...

Economists have expended considerable effort to develop economically meaningful definitions of the somewhat elusive concept of "sustainability". We relate such a definition of sustainability to well known concepts from neoclassical economics, in particular, potential Pareto improvements (in the...

Biodiversity provides essential services to human societies. Many of these services are provided as public goods, so that they will typically be underprovided both by market mechanisms (because of the impossibility of excluding non-payers from using the services) and by government-run systems...