Climate mitigation policy should be imposed over a long period, and spur development of new technologies in order to make stabilization of green house gas concentrations economically feasible. The government may announce current and future policy packages that stimulate current R&D in...

The bulk of acid depositions, which have harmful effects on the environment, are caused by foreign emissions in many European countries. Therefore, if some countries emit more acids, one cannot be sure that countries that emit less will benefit from reduced acid depositions. However, numerical...

Understanding the eect of introducing property rights to natural resources is central in economics, but empirical analysis is frustrated by the complexity of socioecological systems. We construct a detailed bio-economic model of the Norwegian coastal cod shery, which was closed after 1989, to...

Trade with differentiated goods normally provides a form of insurance against disasters, such as floods and fires, through an increasing relative price of goods from the a­fflicted country. With open access renewable resources this is reversed. A country hit by a negative shock recovers faster...

We consider an industry with firms that produce a final good emitting pollution to different degree as a side effect. Pollution is regulated by a tradable quota system where some quotas may have been allocated at the outset, i.e. before the quota market is opened. We study how volatility in...

We explore the efficacy of price and quantity controls as environmental policy instruments in a stochastic setting in which agents are risk averse. We demonstrate that the assumption of risk aversion may improve the performance of a tax relative to that of a system of tradable quotas, and that...

Implementation of the Kyoto Protocol is likely to leave Russia and other Eastern European countries with market power in the market for emission permits. Ceteris paribus, this will raise the permit price above the competitive permit price. However, Russia is also a large exporter of fossil...

We study an international climate agreement that assigns emission quotas to each participating country. Unlike the simplest models in the literature, we assume that abatement costs are affected by R&D activities undertaken in all firms in all countries, i.e. abatement technologies are...

We explore the efficacy of price and quantity controls in a dynamic set up in which the decisions of some agents are irreversible. We demonstrate that the assumption of irreversibility improves the performance of a tax relative that of a system of tradable quotas and significantly alters the...

This paper explores water pricing policy in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, in a political economy perspective. I argue that current water prices are too low and significantly below long-run marginal cost, and demonstrate that water prices must be raised significantly over the next ten...