Most natural commons are subject to discontinuities and threshold effects, so their gradual depletion may result in a sudden irreversible loss of the associated ecological services. Yet, it is often impossible to locate these thresholds with certainty. We analyze this context using a variant of...

Jaffe and Palmer (1997) present three distinct variants of the so- called Porter Hypothesis. The “weak” version of the hypothesis posits that environmental regulation will stimulate certain kinds of environmental innovations. The “narrow” version of the hypothesis asserts that flexible...

The siting of public facilities, such as prisons, airports or incinerators for hazardous wastes faces social rejection by local population. These public goods have a private bad aspect which creates a siting problem: all communities benefit from its existence, but only one (the host) bears its...

Choosing a project for which benefits accrue to all involved agents but brings major costs or additional benefits to only one agent is often problematic. Siting a nationwide nuclear waste disposal or hosting a major sporting event are examples of such a problem: costs or benefits are tied to the...

We propose a model of climate change consistent with four principal stylized facts. First, the benefits and costs of climate change mitigation policies are not evenly distributed across generations. Second, capital accumulation is not determined jointly with emissions policy, but rather as a...