This thesis consists of four self-contained papers, which are all related to important environmental and natural resource issues from a developing country perspective. Paper [I] concerns climate policy and addresses the potential welfare gains of introducing a technology transfer from the North...

This paper estimates the public benefit of preserving 126 000 hectares of old-growth forest in the sub-mountainous region of Sweden through contingent valuation. The primary benefit of this in-situ conservation of biodiversity is the forest’s relative diversity and richness, which provides...

This thesis deals with valuation of nonmarket goods using contingent valuation and consists of four papers and an introduction to the research area. Paper [I] examines the public benefits from preserving old-growth forest in the submountainous region in Sweden. Specifically, it analyzes a...

This paper examines the effect of risk aversion on the optimal rotation age when the stumpage price is stochastic. Using a mean-variance approach, we show that the optimal rotation age under risk aversion may be lower than, equal to, or higher than the corresponding optimal rotation age under...

In this paper, we estimate the dynamic effects on the forest sector of an increased demand for biofuels. This is done by developing a partial adjustment model of the forest sector that enables short, intermediate, and long run price elasticities to be estimated. It is relevant to study the...

This paper concerns optimal nonlinear taxation in an OLG model with two ability-types, where people care about their own consumption relative to (i) other people’s current consumption, (ii) own past consumption, and (iii) other people’s past consumption. We show that intertemporal...

Almost all previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure for status comparisons. Inspired by Veblen (1899), this paper considers a two-type optimal income tax model, where people care about their relative consumption, and where the...

The starting point for this paper is the potential self-control problem underlying the consumption of unhealthy food. The purpose is to analyze public policies, which are designed to correct for the welfare loss associated with such behavior. Contrary to previous studies, our analysis suggests...

This paper concerns international coordination of environmental taxation. The main purpose is to study the global welfare effects that will arise, if there is an agreement between countries to slightly increase their emission taxes. We show that even if each individual country has chosen its...