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...

We study the importance of technology and institutions in determining the size of markets in five different countries and fifteen different German states. The setting of 19th century Europe presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, since it witnessed fundamental change in both...

The participation of interest groups in public policy making is unavoidable. Its unavoidable nature is only matched by the universal suspicion with which it has been seen by both policy makers and the public. Recently, however, there has been a growing literature that examines the participation...

Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions, in contrast to what would be suggested by a reasoning extending the Coase Theorem to politics? Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions because of differences in the beliefs and ideologies of their peoples or leaders? Or...

Why do inefficient %uF818 non-growth enhancing %uF818 institutions emerge and persist? This paper develops a simple framework to provide some answers to this question. Political institutions determine the allocation of political power, and economic institutions determine the framework for...

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...

This article studies how liability for environmentally harmful discharges affects the incentives of firms to engage in cleanup and invest in precautions, as well as the incentives of consumers to purchase the goods whose production leads to discharges. Our main conclusion is that making firms...

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,...

I examine Ronald Coase's criticism of standard regulatory and tax policies to address environmental externalities. I elaborate some of Coase's key points and discuss opportunities for Coasean exchange as an alternative mitigation approach. Regulation, tax, and Coasean exchange, such as through...

In a world of certainty, the design of environmental policy is relatively straightforward, and boils down to maximizing the present value of the flow of social benefits minus costs. But the real world is one of considerable uncertainty -- over the physical and ecological impact of pollution,...