Current policies directed at mitigating global warming appear unlikely to prevent temperatures from rising to levels that would trigger a precipitous increase in the costs of climate change. Various attempts at international cooperation to avoid this outcome have failed. Why is this problem so...

Negotiations pursuant to the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action appear likely to lead to a 2015 Paris agreement that embodies a hybrid climate policy architecture, combining top-down elements, such as for monitoring, reporting, and verification, with bottom-up elements, including "nationally...

We explore the effects of environmental taxes that imprecisely target pollution. A review of actual policies indicates few (if any) examples of a true tax on pollution. More typically, environmental taxes target an input or output that is correlated with pollution. We construct a simple...

What incentives do governments have to negotiate "new trade agreements," i.e., agreements that constrain not only governments' choices of tariffs, but also their domestic regulatory policies? We focus on horizontal product standards, i.e., those that impose requirements along a horizontal...

International investment agreements employ dispute settlement procedures that differ markedly from their counterparts in trade agreements along three key dimensions: standing (i.e., the right to file grievances), the nature of the remedy, and the remedial period. In the state-to-state dispute...

Existing formal models of the relationship between trade policy and regulatory policy suggest the potential for a regulatory race to the bottom. WTO rules and disputes, however, center on complaints about excessively stringent regulations. This paper bridges the gap between the existing formal...