The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative...

Ocean acidification is increasingly recognized as a major global problem. Yet economic assessments of its effects are currently almost absent. Unlike most other marine organisms, mollusks, which have significant commercial value worldwide, have relatively solid scientific evidence of biological...

Estimates of the impacts of observed climate change during the 20th century obtained by different integrated assessment models (IAMs) are separated into their main natural and anthropogenic components. The estimates of the costs that can be attributed to natural variability factors and to the...

A Bentham–Rawls welfare function is the weighted sum of the net present welfare (Bentham) and the welfare of the worst-off generation (Rawls). If utility is non-decreasing over time, optimal climate policy is more stringent in the near-term under the Bentham criterion than under the...

Bootstrap and smoothed bootstrap methods are used to estimate the uncertainty about the total impact of climate change, and to assess the performance of commonly used impact functions. Kernel regression is extended to include restrictions on the functional form. Impact functions do not describe...

The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative...

This paper investigates the role of emissions control on reducing the tail-effect of the fat-tailed distribution of the climate sensitivity. Through a simple analysis on temperature distributions and some numerical simulations using the well-known DICE model, we find that the option for...

The transition from autocracy to democracy may lead a country to break-up. The break-ups of the USSR and Yugoslavia led to sharp falls in emissions. If something similar would happen in China, projected emissions would fall by 50% or more. Break-up uncertainty dominates other scenario uncertainty.

We develop a climate-economy model with active learning. We consider three ways of active learning: improved observations, adding observations from the past and improved theory from climate research. From the model, we find that the decision maker invests a significant amount of money in climate...