International concern about climate change has led to the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in 1997, which contains legally binding emission targets for industrialized countries to be achieved during the commitment period 2008-2012. While proponents of the Protocol celebrate it as a breakthrough in...

We investigate the importance of ?what?-flexibility on top of ?where?- and ?when?-flexibility for alternative emission control schemes that prescribe long-term temperature targets and eventually impose additional constraints on the rate of temperature change. We find that ?what?-flexibility...

Klimaschutz stellt aus Sicht der ökonomischen Theorie ein rein öffentliches Gut dar. Internationale Kooperation zum Zweck der Milderung oder Verhinderung der globalen Erwärmung ist daher mit den bekannten fatalen Anreizproblemen behaftet: Auf der Basis freiwilliger, dezentraler Entscheidungen...

We investigate how the U.S. withdrawal and the amendments of the Bonn climate policy conference in 2001 will change the economic and environmental impacts of the Kyoto Protocol in its original form. Based on simulations with a large-scale computable general equilibrium model, we find that U.S....

In international politics, intergovernmental treaties provide the rules of the game. Similar to private law, treaty designers face a trade-off between flexibility to adjust to unforeseen contingencies and the danger that the binding nature of the treaty and hence, the level of commitment by...

We show that U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol is straightforward under political economy considerations. The reason is that U.S. compliance costs exceed low willingness to pay for dealing with global warming in the U.S. The withdrawal had a crucial impact on the concretion of the Protocol...