Energy-intensive infrastructure may tie up fossil energy use and carbon emissions for a long time after investments, making the structure of such investments crucial for society. Much or most of the resulting carbon emissions can often be eliminated later, through a costly retrofit. This paper...

We study optimal climate policy for a policy bloc of countries facing a market where emissions offsets can be purchased from a non-policy fringe of countries (such as for the CDM). Policy-bloc firms benefit from free quota allocations whose quantity is updated according to firms' past emissions,...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is an offset mechanism designed to reduce the overall cost of implementing a given target for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in industrialized Annex B countries of the Kyoto Protocol, by shifting some of the emission reductions to Non-Annex B countries. This...

We study interactions between a "policy bloc's" emissions quota market and an offset market where emissions offsets can be purchased from a non-policy "fringe" of countries (such as for the CDM under the Kyoto Protocol). Policy-bloc firms are assumed to benefit from free quota allocations that...

I study climate policy choices for a 'policy bloc' of fuel-importers, when a 'fringe' of other fuel importers have no climate policy, fuel exporters consume no fossil fuels, and importers produce no such fuels. The policy bloc and exporter blocs act strategically in fossil fuel markets. When the...

We study a labor market where worker’s disutilities of effort differ, firm’s outputs depend on the joint efforts of many workers, and individual worker characteristics cannot be observed or inferred by firms. Under assumptions similar to those in Holmström (1982), we demonstrate that an...

We present a stated-preference study where values of statistical lives (VSL) are derived both as public and private goods, and we distinguish between three different death causes, heart disease, environmentally related illnesses and traffic accidents. 1000 randomly chosen individuals in Norway...

This lecture discusses relationships between environmental and resource qualities and loads, and economic development, theoretically and empirically. We start in section 2 with a list of theoretical arguments that may or may not justify a tendency for environmental quality to first deteriorate,...

I derive the marginal value of a public good in multiperson households, measured alternatively by one household member’s willingness to pay (WTP) for the good on behalf of the household, or by the sum of individual WTP values across family members. Households are assumed to allocate their...

We model the exchange rate market for a country that initially follows a band policy, as a four-stage sequential game of complete information, where a stochastic shock is realized in the last stage. Given a fixed cost of leaving the band, we show that three types of equilibria may exist,...