This paper provides a primer on the economics of environmental innovation. Our intention is not to write a pure review paper, but to also provide an up-to-date textbook treatment on the issue. Thus, we start by defining the marginal costs of both emissions and of emissions abatement. We then...

How much ability does the Fed have to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates? We argue that the presence of substantial debt in fixed-rate, prepayable mortgages means that the ability to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates depends not just on their current level but also on...

How much of the spatial distribution of economic activity today is determined by history rather than by geographic fundamentals? And if history matters for the distribution, does it also affect overall efficiency? This paper develops a tractable theoretical and empirical framework that aims to...

Katharine Coman's "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation," published in March 1911 in the first issue of the American Economic Review addressed issues of water supply, rights, and organization. These same issues have relevance today 100 years later in face of growing concern about the...

The Great Depression ushered in a long era of deglobalization that lasted for many decades. An old conventional wisdom (e.g. Polanyi) argues that the common aspect of this shock across all countries, a deep depression, can explain the large and persistent global shift away from orthodox liberal...

For many consumer packaged goods products, researchers have documented a form of state dependence whereby consumers become "loyal" to products they have consumed in the past. That is, consumers behave as though there is a utility premium from continuing to purchase the same product as they have...

We develop a method that allows one to compute incomplete-market equilibria routinely for Markovian equilibria (when they exist). The main difficulty to be overcome arises from the set of state variables. There are, of course, exogenous state variables driving the economy but, in an incomplete...

This paper studies an economy in which incomplete markets and strong complementarities interact to generate path dependent aggregate output fluctuations. An economy is said to be path dependent when the effect of a shock on the level of aggregate output is permanent in the absence of future...

People's fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that previous transactions play an important role in shaping perceptions of...

Addressing climate change requires transitioning away from coal-based energy. Recent structural change models demonstrate that temporary interventions could induce permanent fuel switching when transitional dynamics exhibit strong path dependence. Exploiting changes in local coal supply driven...