Sustainability has been largely replaced by discounted utilitarianism in contemporary climate-change economics. Our approach rejuvenates sustainability by expanding the conception of the quality of life, along the lines of the UN Human Development Reports, to include not only consumption, but...

In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now in most industries for most potential users, appropriating...

In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now, in most industries and for most potential users,...

What drives extreme economic events? Motivated by recent theory, and events in US subprime markets, we begin to open the black box of extremes. Specifically, we extend standard economic analysis of extreme risk, allowing for dynamics and endogeneity. We explain how endogenous extremes may arise...

The optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example, is analyzed in a model where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preferences (where people compare their own current consumption with...

The optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example, is analyzed in a model where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preferences (where people compare their own current consumption with...