With countries from around the world set to meet in Copenhagen to try to hammer out a post-2012 climate change agreement, no one would disagree that a U.S. commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions is essential to such a global pact. However, despite U.S. president Obama's recent announcement...

The climate-trade nexus gains increasing attention as governments are taking great efforts to forge a post-2012 climate change regime to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. This raises the issues of the scope of trade-related measures and of when and how they could be used. This paper discusses how far...

At least ten Latin American and Caribbean countries have pledged to achieve carbon neutrality. Has electricity planning in the region evolved towards reaching these goals? We compare power generation capacity in 2023 to announced plans in 2019. We then estimate committed emissions from existing...

Long-term Strategies for Decarbonization, termed long-term low emissions and development strategies (LT-LEDS) by the UNFCCC, and sometimes referred to as LTS, can influence the transition to a resilient and decarbonized economy. LT-LEDS additionally make it possible to identify investments and...

We study the effect of temperature on economic development on the sub-national level, employing cross-sectional data for up to 15,533 sub-national units from two distinct sources. In contrast to the existing cross-country literature on the temperature-income relationship, our setting allows us...

We examine the optimal management of emission permit markets when banking but not borrowing of permits is allowed. The regulator maximizes expected social welfare through an optimal allocation rule in an infinite horizon setting. The policy is second-best as the emission cap is set before the...

After twenty years of global negotiations, the world is still far from a comprehensive climate agreement. The "top-down" approach embodied by the Kyoto Protocol has all but stalled, chiefly due to disagreements over levels of ambition and objections to financial transfers. To avoid those...

Weather experts around the world are foreseeing a strong El Niño in 2014. In India, these developments are feared to lead to droughts. In the last 14 years, out of the four El Niño years globally, three resulted in Indian droughts. Since the 1980s, all the six droughts faced by India were in...

This paper develops a dynamic model consisting of two regions (North and South), in which the accumulation of human capital is negatively influenced by the global stock of pollution. By characterizing the equilibrium strategy of each region, we show that the regions’ best responses can be...