Pricing carbon emissions from a jurisdiction could harm the competitiveness of local firms, causing the leakage of emissions and economic activity to other regions. Past research concentrated on national carbon prices, but the impacts of subnational carbon prices could be more severe due to the...

The economics of environmental federalism identifies two book-end departures from the first-best, which equates marginal costs and benefits in all local jurisdictions. Local governments may respond to local conditions, but ignore inter-jurisdictional spillovers. Alternatively, central...

By reducing the costs of environmental protection, technological change is important for promoting green growth. This entails both the creation of new technologies and more widespread deployment of existing green technologies. This paper reviews the literature on environmentally friendly...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of power density [Watts/m2] into economics. By introducing an explicit spatial structure into a simple general equilibrium model we are able to show how the power density of available energy resources determines the extent of energy...

This paper discusses the likely evolution of the trade and environment issue in the World Trade Organization after the upcoming ministerial meeting in Singapore this December. It makes a number of points. Progress within the GATT/WTO on this issue looks likely to be slow and painfully...

Green growth is about making growth resource-efficient, cleaner and more resilient without slowing it. This paper aims at clarifying this in an analytical framework and proposing foundations for green growth. This framework identifies channels through which green policies can potentially...

Parochial politics is typically associated with poor leadership and low levels of public good provision. This paper explores the possibility that community involvement in politics need not necessarily worsen governance and, indeed, can be efficiency-enhancing when the context is appropriate....

Using the mass closure of development zones in 2004 as a natural experiment, we examine the causal effect of development zones on firm level TFP in China. The difference-in-difference estimator shows that on average, loss of development zone policies results in 6.5% loss of firms' TFP....

Place-based policies commonly target underperforming areas, such as deteriorating downtown business districts and disadvantaged regions. Principal examples include enterprise zones, European Union Structural Funds, and industrial cluster policies. Place-based policies are rationalized by various...

We study optimal spatial policies in a quantitative trade and geography framework with spillovers and spatial sorting of heterogeneous workers. We characterize the spatial transfers that must hold in efficient allocations, as well as labor subsidies that can implement them. There exists scope...