This paper examines the application of quasi-experimental methods in environmental economics. We begin with two observations: i) standard quasi-experimental methods, first applied in other microeconomic fields, typically assume unit-level treatments that do not spill over across units; (ii)...

Climate change management is a global challenge that requires social science as much as it requires natural science. We provide a brief introduction to the physical science of climate change, written to provide essential background for economists and other social scientists. We also highlight...

Within the field of environmental economics, the role of technological change has received much attention. The long-term nature of many environmental problems, such as climate change, makes understanding the evolution of technology an important part of projecting future impacts. Moreover, in...

There has been keen interest in recent years in environmentally motivated or 'green' tax reforms. This paper employs analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to investigate the costs of such reforms, concentrating on the question of whether these costs can be eliminated when revenues...

This paper demonstrates how three important results in environmental economics, true under mild conditions in closed economies, are false or need serious amendment in a world with international trade in goods. Since the three results we highlight have framed much of the ongoing discussion and...

This paper builds two simple general equilibrium models to demonstrate the equivalence between the Pigovian tax and the combination of a presumptive tax and an environmental subsidy. A presumptive tax is a tax that is imposed under the presumption that all production uses a dirty technology or...

Using data assembled by the Global Environmental Monitoring System we examine the reduced-form relationship between various environmental indicators and the level of a country's per capita income. Our study covers four types of indicators: concentrations of urban air pollution; measures of the...

Climate policy is complicated by the considerable compounded uncertainties over the costs and benefits of abatement. We don't even know the probability distributions for future temperatures and impacts, making cost-benefit analysis based on expected values challenging to say the least. There are...

Psychological insights have made inroads within most major areas of study in economics. One area where less advance has been made is environmental and resource economics. In this study, we examine the implications of preference reversals over evaluation modes, in which stated economic values...

I examine the risk/return tradeoff for environmental investments, and its implications for policy choice. Consider a policy to reduce carbon emissions. To what extent does the value of such a policy depend on the expected future damages from global warming versus uncertainty over those damages,...