A conservation good, such as the rainforest, is a hostage: it is possessed by S who may prefer to consume it, but B receives a larger value from continued conservation. A range of prices would make trade mutually beneficial. So, why doesn't B purchase conservation, or the forest, from S? If this...

This paper explores details behind the phenomenal increase in global crude oil production over the last century and a half and the implications if that trend should be reversed. I document that a key feature of the growth in production has been exploitation of new geographic areas rather than...

When studying solutions to long-term environmental problems such as climate change, it is important to consider the role that technological change may play. Nonetheless, to date few economic models of climate change explicitly model the link between policy and technological change. There is a...

Climate modelers have recognized the possibility of abrupt climate changes caused by a reorganization of the North Atlantic's current pattern (technically known as a thermohaline circulation collapse). This circulation system now warms north-western Europe and transports carbon dioxide to the...

This paper considers the evidence on real commodity prices over 160 years for 30 commodities representing 7.89 trillion USD worth of production in 2011. In so doing, it suggests and documents a complete typology of real commodity prices, comprising long-run trends, medium-run cycles, and...

I present a non-technical high-level review the concept of sustainability and the various approaches to quantifying it.

There is limited evidence of behavioral changes resulting from electricity information feedback. Using a randomized control trial from a New York apartment building, we study long-term effects of information feedback from “Modlet” in-home devices, which provide near-real-time plug-level...

We model welfare-maximizing policy in an infinite-horizon setting when the probability of a tipping point, the welfare change due to a tipping point, and knowledge about a tipping point's trigger all depend on the policy path. Analytic results demonstrate how optimal policy depends on the...

We introduce an algorithm for solving dynamic economic models that merges stochastic simulation and projection approaches: we use simulation to approximate the ergodic measure of the solution, we construct a fixed grid covering the support of the constructed ergodic measure, and we use...

Linear RE models typically possess a multiplicity of solutions. Consider, however, the requirement that the solution coefficients must not be infinitely discontinuous in the model's structural parameters. In particular, we require that the solutions should be continuous in the limit as those...