A unilateral carbon tax trades off the distortionary costs of taxation and the future gains from slowing down global warming. Because the cost is local and immediate, whereas the benefit is global and delayed, this tradeoff tends to be unfavorable to unilateral carbon taxes. We show that this...

Climate policies vary widely across countries, with some countries imposing stringent emissions policies and others doing very little. When climate policies vary across countries, energy-intensive industries have an incentive to relocate to places with few or no emissions restrictions, an effect...

How do environmental goods and policies shape spatial patterns of economic activity? How will climate change modify these impacts over the coming decades? How do agglomeration, commuting, and other spatial forces and policies affect environmental quality? We distill theoretical and empirical...

This paper proposes that strong financial, judicial, and labor market institutions provide comparative advantage in clean industries, and thereby improve a country's environmental quality. Five complementary tests support this hypothesis. First, industries that depend on institutions are...

Jurisdictions adopt heterogeneous climate policies that vary both in terms of ambition and in terms of policy approach, with some jurisdictions pricing carbon and others subsidizing clean production. We distinguish two types of policy spillovers associated with diverse policy approaches to...

We analyze a fundamental dilemma and time-inconsistency problem facing a climate coalition producing natural gas. In the short term, it is tempting to export more to outcompete coal. When this policy is anticipated, however, investments in renewables fall and emissions ultimately increase. When...

We study electric vehicle (EV) tax credits in the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the largest climate policy in US history, with three goals. First, we provide the first ex-post microeconomic welfare analysis of this central component of the IRA. Event studies around changes in eligibility for...

We study the role of trade policy in one of the most pressing climate policy challenges that developing countries face: meeting voluntary emission restraints (VERs). To do so, we develop a general equilibrium trade model that extends Caliendo and Parro (2015) in three dimensions. First, we model...

We examine positive and normative questions that arise with the joint use of carbon taxes and green subsidies in an open economy. Moving from autarky to free trade induces countries to introduce green subsidies and reduce carbon taxes, in order to reduce foreign emissions. In contrast to the...

We study deforestation in a dynamic world trade system. We first document that between 1990-2020: (i) global forest area has decreased by 7.1 percent, with large heterogeneity across countries, (ii) deforestation is associated with expansions of agricultural land use, (iii) deforestation is...