Policies under consideration within the Climate Convention would impose CO2 controls on only a subset of nations. A model of economic growth and emissions, coupled to an analysis of the climate system, is used to explore the consequences of a sample proposal of this type. The results show how...

Drawing on the wider ‘catching up’ literature, we examine the rapid growth in Chinese spending on science and technology, which, in spite of its growing infrastructure, remains heavily reliant on foreign inputs. We examine both the economic and political drivers behind China’s scientific...

The probability distribution of the internal rate of return of an investment is derived under conditions where uncertainty in costs and returns can be described by a multi-variate normal distribution. The paper sketches the derivation of the exact probability distribution for the rate of return...

Two computable general equilibrium models, one global and the other providing U.S. regional detail, are applied to analysis of the future of U.S. natural gas. The focus is on uncertainties including the scale and cost of gas resources, the costs of competing technologies, the pattern of...

The MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis model is applied to synthetic policies that match key attributes of a set of cap-and-trade proposals being considered by the U.S. Congress in spring 2007. The bills fall into two groups: one specifies emissions reductions of 50% to 80% below 1990...

Discounted cash flow analysis is the most common method for evaluation of investment projects, yet practitioners worry about its shortcomings. In particular, there is concern that standard DCF comparisons may introduce bias against long-term investments. Here, we explore a possible source of...