Trade, the Internet, and product innovation have greatly enlarged the number of goods ( N ) in the consumer's choice set. The welfare effect of the growth in N has been extensively discussed in the specialized literature, but very little has filtered down to our textbook models of a competitive...

The economics of electricity is shaped by its physics. A well know example is the non-storability of electricity that causes its price to fluctuate widely. More generally, physical constraints cause electricity to be a heterogeneous good along three dimensions - time, space, and lead-time....

An estimated 2.6 billion people rely on traditional biomass for home cooking and heating, so improving the efficiency of household cookstoves could provide significant environmental, social and economic benefits. Some researchers have estimated that potential greenhouse gas emission reductions...

We are proud of Challenges in Sustainability's (CiS) fruitful start. A variety of quality research articles, editorials and notes have been published on a range of themes and topics, including sustainability governance [1], improved cookstoves [2,3], the potentials of 3-D printing in the global...

Standard economic analysis assumes the sets of public and private goods to be exogenously given. Yet societies very often choose the public-private mix, using resources to convert seemingly private goods into ones with public goods characteristics and vice versa. And, in practice, we see a...

The paper considers welfare effects of rent control when it is applied only in a sector of a rental housing market. In rent controlled sectors of the Danish rental housing market, we find welfare reducing overallocation of square meters between 9 and 17 per cent of actual allocations. Looking at...

Many analysts have argued that energy efficiency investments offer an enormous "win-win" opportunity to both reduce negative externalities and save money. This overview paper presents a simple model of investment in energy-using capital stock with two types of market failures: first,...

While some countries have achieved considerable development, many others still lack accessto the goods and services considered standard in the modern society. As CO2 emissions and development are often correlated, this paper employs the theoretical background of the Environmental Kuznets Curve...