We consider a model with two energy sources, a non-renewable one, cheap but polluting, and a renewable one, expensive but clean, let’s say coal and solar. The aim of environmental policy is to maintain atmospheric carbon concentration under a given ceiling, chosen to prevent an excessive rise...

Consider a general equilibrium framework where the marginal cost of extraction from several deposits of an exhaustible resource is constant in terms of an inexhaustible perfect substitiute and differs between deposits. The instantaneous rate of productionfrom the inexhaustible resourcce is...

Regulation of environmental externalities like global warming from the burning of fossil fuels (e.g., coal and oil) is often done by capping both emission flows and stocks. For example, the European Union and states in the Northeastern United States have introduced caps on flows of carbon...

The effective labor possibility frontier (ELPF) is defined as the set of statically efficient allocations of labor imputs in the competing tasks of production and R&D. It summaries the labor scarcity constraint. We show that the dynamically efficient paths of R&D, resource extraction and...

There is a large literature on the optimal order of exploitation of natural resources. We explore the impact of specific technical progress that enables the saving of resource inputs in production on the order of exploitation. Models of growth tend to assume uniform and global technical progess....