Using climate change as a prototype motivating example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low-probability high-impact catastrophes. The paper shows that having an uncertain multiplicative parameter, which scales or amplifies exogenous shocks and...

This paper postulates the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic "World Climate Assembly" (WCA) that votes for a single worldwide price on carbon emissions via the basic democratic principle of one-person one-vote majority rule. If this WCA framework can be accepted in the first place,...

Thus far, most approaches to resolving the global warming externality have been quantity based. With n different national entities, a meaningful comprehensive treaty involves negotiating n different binding emissions quotas (whether tradeable or not). In post-Kyoto practice this n-dimensional...

Climate change is a global "free rider" problem because significant abatement of greenhouse gases is an expensive public good requiring international cooperation to apportion compliance among states. But it is also a global "free driver" problem because geoengineering the stratosphere with...

Using only information based on current directly-observable market behavior, the paper shows how to make rigorous dynamic welfare comparisons among economies or economic situations having arbitrarily-different endowments and technologies, but sharing a common dynamic preference ordering. The...

A critical issue in climate-change economics is the specification of the so-called "damages function" and its interaction with the unknown uncertainty of catastrophic outcomes. This paper asks how much we might be misled by our economic assessment of climate change when we employ a conventional...

It is widely recognized that the economics of distant-future events, like climate change, is critically dependent upon the choice of a discount rate. Unfortunately, it is unclear how to discount distant-future events when the future discount rate itself is unknown. In previous work, an...

The possibility of intertemporal banking and borrowing of tradeable permits is often viewed as tilting the various policy debates about optimal pollution control instruments toward favoring such time-flexible quantities. The present paper shows that this view is misleading, at least for the...

It is difficult to resolve the global warming free-rider externality problem by negotiating many different quantity targets. By contrast, negotiating a single internationally-binding minimum carbon price (the proceeds from which are domestically retained) counters self-interest by incentivizing...

In theory, and under some quite strong assumptions, there exists an important rigorous quantitative relationship among the following four fundamental economic concepts: (1) "wealth"; (2) "income"; (3) "sustainability"; (4) "accounting". These four basic concepts are placed in quotation marks...