China's rampant environmental pollution problems and rising greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting climate change are undermining its long-term economic growth. China, from its own perspective cannot afford to and, from an international perspective, is not meant to continue on the...

The authors consider a symmetric model composed of two countries and a firm in each country. Firms produce the same good by means of a polluting technology which uses fossil energy. However, these firms can adopt a clean technology which uses a renewable energy having a lower unit cost....

Conventional analysis of the economics of environmental policy usually claims that emission taxes induce a stronger incentive for an improvement in pollution abatement technologies compared to emission standards. In contrast, recent empirical studies reveal that there is no systematic...

We investigate conditions that aggravate market failures in energy innovations, and suggest optimal policy instruments to address them. Using an intertemporal general equilibrium model we show that 'small' market imperfections may trigger a several decades lasting dominance of an incumbent...

The topic of this note is issues related to R&D expenditures leading to improved technologies for reducing environmentally harmful emissions. The focus is on he following questions: Will a market economy where environmental policies are restricted to taxes or quotas give the socially efficient...

We study the introduction of new technologies when their costs are subject to idiosyncratic uncertainty and can only be fully learned through individual experience. We set up a dynamic model of clean experience goods that replace old polluting consumption options and show how optimal regulation...

Policy diffusion refers to the process by which a political innovation like the introduction of a novel emission tax disseminates over time among countries. In order to analyze this issue from an economic point of view we develop a simple two-country-model of the taxation of emissions in...

A central question in climate policy is whether early investments in low-carbon technologies are a useful first step towards a more effective climate agreement in the future. We introduce a climate cooperation model with endogenous R&D investments where countries protect their international...

This paper provides a cross-country review of progress towards green growth in selected emerging market economies that are members or partners of the OECD. It draws on the country studies conducted within the OECD Environmental Performance Review Programme for Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia,...

We derive policy rules for a highly aggregated fossil-based world economy with two competing stochastic thresholds or tipping points. Current production generates emissions that add to a stock of GHGs that affect the probability distribution of hitting a climate threshold with severe...