The success of global climate policies over the coming decades depends on the diffusion of 'green' technologies. This requires that international environmental agreements (IEAs) and trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) interact productively.Using a simple and tractable model, we...

The literature on environmental R&D frequently studies innovation as a two-stage process, with a single R&D event leading from a conventional polluting technology to a perfectly clean backstop. We allow for uncertainty in innovation in that the new technology may turn out to generate a new...

We study the optimal R&D trajectory in a setting where new technologies are never perfect backstops in the sense that there is no perfectly clean technology that eventually solves the pollution problem once and for all. New technologies have stings attached, i.e. each emits a specific stock...

Most real world emission permit schemes are in effect hybrid instruments that feature both quantity and price controls. While the effects of price bounds are well understood for issues such as uncertain abatement costs it has not been investigated how such bounds affect time-consistency of...

The performance of market based environmental regulation is affected by patents and vice versa. This interaction is studied for a new type of innovation where new technologies reduce emissions of a specific pollutant but at the same time cause a new type of damage. A robust finding is that the...

We conduct a field experiment involving real purchasing decisions in a large supermarket chain to test the effect of different regulatory interventions aiming to induce a more climateâ€friendly diet on intrinsic motivation. Focusing on shoppers who prefer the dirty variety, we compare...

We combine natural science modelling and valuation techniques to present economic analyses of a variety of land use change scenarios generated for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment. Specifically, the agricultural, greenhouse gas, recreational and urban greenspace impacts of the envisioned...

The increase in the level of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere in the last centuries, and the subsequent increase in temperature, has been a widely studied area in the last few decades. Climate change has become a key item on the political agenda due to concerns regarding the...

We show that for a broad class of technologies the relationship between policy stringency and the rate of technology adoption is inverted U-shaped. This happens when the marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves of conventional and new technologies intersect, which invariably occurs when emissions...