This paper presents an economic interpretation of the optimal “stopping” of perpetual project opportunities under both certainty and uncertainty. Prior to stopping, the expected rate of return from delay exceeds the rate of interest. The expected rate of return from delay is the sum of the...

We study long-run growth in a multi-sector economy with non-renewable resource use and endogenous innovations. Unlike recent capital resource models, we find that poor input substitution need not be detrimental for sustainable growth; on the contrary, combined with resource depletion it fosters...

We extend the shallow lake model by adding the capital stock of an industry. A government can mitigate the effects of pollution arising from industrial activities by imposing the requirement to abate emissions. Within this framework two scenarios are examined: in the social optimal benchmark,...

We characterize the location, stability and approach-time of optimal steady states in single-state, infinite-horizon, autonomous models by means of a simple function of the state variable, defined in terms of the model's primitives. The method does not require the solution of the underlying...

Complex dynamic systems can undergo changes in feedbacks between system components causing a rapid and persistent shift in system behavior (“regime shifts”), and potentially reduce welfare from declining provision of important ecosystem services. In this paper, we provide an analytical...

In this paper we examine the role played by environmental externalities in shaping the dynamics of an economy with two sectors (a farming sector and an industrial one), free inter-sectoral labor mobility and heterogeneous agents (workers/farmers and industrial entrepreneurs). We find that, in...

In this paper, we build a Closed-Loop Nash Equilibrium of a private property productive asset oligopoly. We compare and contrast private with common property in terms of exploitation rates and social welfare, and provide a comparative dynamic analysis with respect to the number of firms in the...

We study the effect of environmental risk on the extraction of a common resource. Using a dynamic and non-cooperative game in which an environmental event impacts the renewability and the quality of the resource, we show that the anticipation of such an event has an ambiguous effect on...

Exploitation diminishes the capacity of renewable resources to withstand environmental stress, increasing their vulnerability to extreme conditions that may trigger abrupt changes. The onset of such events depends on the coincidence of extreme environmental conditions and on the resource state...

In this paper we investigate the optimal harvesting of a renewable natural resource. While in most standard approaches the resource is located at a single point, we allow the resource to be distributed spatially. Consequently, an agent who exploits the resource has to travel from one location to...