Climate change remains one of the major international environmental challenges facing nations. Up to now, nations have to date adopted minimal policies to slow climate change. Moreover, there has been no major improvement in emissions trends as of the latest data. The current study uses the...

Donald Trump's election and his nomination of Scott Pruitt, a climate skeptic, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency drastically downshifted expectations on US climate-change policy. We study firms' stock-price reactions and institutional investors' portfolio adjustments after these...

Distinguishing the two rates helps resolve arguments as to whether the choice of discount rate should be based on ethical considerations or empirical information (such as market interest rates), and about whether the discount rate should serve a prescriptive or descriptive role. Separating out...

Instead of efficiently pricing greenhouse gases, policy makers have favored measures that implicitly or explicitly subsidize low carbon fuels. We simulate a transportation-sector cap & trade program (CAT) and three policies currently in use: ethanol subsidies, a renewable fuel standard (RFS),...

We report numerical simulation results using a multiyear global multi country modeling framework which we use to assess the impacts of alternative emissions cuts which will likely come under consideration for the process to follow the December 2009 UNFCCC negotiation in Copenhagen. The...

A rapidly growing empirical literature seeks to estimate the costs of future climate change from time series variation in weather. I formally analyze the consequences of a change in climate for economic outcomes. I show that those consequences are driven by changes in the distribution of...

This paper shows that unilateral decarbonization pays for itself in large economies. We estimate economic damages from global temperature shocks and combine them with a climate-economy model to construct Domestic Costs of Carbon: $226 per ton for the United States and $216 per ton for the...

I distinguish between reduction offsets and removal offsets, the former generated by a reduction in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions and the latter generated by the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. I show that only removal offsets make any contribution to mitigating climate...

Climate change management is a global challenge that requires social science as much as it requires natural science. We provide a brief introduction to the physical science of climate change, written to provide essential background for economists and other social scientists. We also highlight...