Critics of modern macroeconomics often raise concerns about unwarranted welfare conclusions and data mining. This paper illustrates these concerns with a thought experiment, based on the debate in environmental economics about the appropriate discount rate in climate change analyses: I set up an...

Champions of sustainable growth often call for more durable production technologies with less capital depreciation. As investment in more durable capital is encouraged by lower interest rates, we investigate whether policy makers can steer the economy towards a path with low interest rates in...

Earlier meta-analyses of the economic impact of climate change are updated with more data, with three new results: (1) The central estimate of the economic impact of global warming is always negative. (2) The confidence interval about the estimates is much wider. (3) Elicitation methods are most...

Critics of modern macroeconomics often raise concerns about unwarranted welfare conclusions and data mining. This paper illustrates these concerns with a thought experiment, based on the debate in environmental economics about the appropriate discount rate in climate change analyses: I set up an...

This review considers the role of environmental effects in transport investment appraisal, mainly from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis, the most widely adopted appraisal technique. Although the basic principles of CBA are straightforward, several complications are identified that may...

Optimal harvesting of prey in a predator–prey ecosystem is studied under the condition that the existence of the predator has value. Predators (birds) and humans (fishers) compete for prey (shellfish). The behavior of the system is studied and conditions for optimal control are deduced....

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...

Certain types of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities can generate an ‘insurance-like’ benefit for firms (Godfrey, 2005). Thus far, this risk management hypothesis has been verified for the effects of firm-specific negative events. We argue that this insurance-like benefit of...

Dams are essential for water storage and hydropower generation, but change river flow patterns and endanger local environments. Dam projects may further exacerbate already existing problems in trans-boundary rivers. We consider three scenarios of institutional factors: (1) each country pursues...

We examine the role of support for coalition stability in common pool resource games such as fisheries games. Some players may not want to join a coalition that jointly manages a resource. Still, because they benefit from spillovers, they may want to support the coalition with a transfer payment...