We consider the economics of global environmental risks. In this area, we are dealing with risks that are poorly understood, endogenous, collective, and irreversible. In policy terms, the nature and extent of uncertainty about global climate change implies that society's position will be...

Global climate change, and policies to slow it or adapt to it, may be among the primary forces shaping the world's economy throughout the next century and beyond. Nonetheless, popular treatments of this issue commonly ignore economics. This introductory essay sketches some of the uncertainties...

Many analysts presume that the appropriators of a common-pool resource are trapped in a Hobbesian state of nature and cannot themselves create rules to counteract the perverse incentives they face in managing the resource. The logical consequence of this view is to recommend that an external...

Local commons encompass a wide range of resources whose shared feature is the need for some form of collective management. In what follows, we shall be concerned mainly with the problems of implementing a collective management plan. Whatever the mechanisms invoked, many recent contributions to...

My purpose here is to provide a non-technical introduction to the economics of climate change. I will sketch the scientific background and uncertainties, survey the results of existing studies of the impacts of climate change, present a summary of a study of efficient policies to slow global...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the 'dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...