One of the key decisions that economists working on integrated studies of climate change face is the selection of the method of accounting for damages resulting from possible climate change across a long temporal scale and the method for the intertemporal comparison of the costs associated with...

This paper links Hotelling's theory, in recent literature applied to an emission constrained environment, with the classical capacity planning framework to describe portfolio time-paths in electricity production. Emission targets are considered by a ceiling on the stock of pollution. We propose...

It would seem that Hotelling's rule and its related models of resource extraction and electricity production as largest consumer of scarce resources are closely related. However, although fixed costs and a non-storable product are essential in characterizing electricity markets, they can hardly...

I offer a selective review of discounting and climate policy. Analytic and numerical models show that different assumptions greatly change the degree to which decisions about climate policy depend on the discount rate. I discuss a claim that standard models exaggerate the current generation's...

Nowadays, as stressed by important strategic documents like for instance the 2009 EU White Paper on Adaptation or the recent 2009 "Copenhagen Accord", it is amply recognized that both mitigation and adaptation strategies are necessary to combat climate change. This paper enriches the rapidly...

Uncertainty plays a key role in the economics of climate change, and the discussions surrounding its implications for climate policy are far from settled. We give an overview of the literature on uncertainty in integrated assessment models of climate change and identify some future research...

This article presents an integrated assessment of climate change, air pollution, and energy security policy. Basis of our analysis is the MERGE model, designed to study the interaction between the global economy, energy use, and the impacts of climate change. For our purposes we expanded MERGE...

In this paper we investigate the introduction of an export tax on steam coal levied by an individual country (Australia), or a group of major exporting countries. The policy motivation would be twofold: generating tax revenues against the background of improved terms-of-trade, while CO2...

In this paper, we develop a microeconomic approach to deduce greenhouse gas abatement cost curves of the residential heating sector. By accounting for household behavior, we find that welfare-based abatement costs are generally higher than pure technical equipment costs. Our results are based on...

Despite growing scientific evidence that passing a 2°C temperature increase may trigger tipping points in climate dynamics, most Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) based on Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) with smooth quadratic damage functions are unable to account for the possibility of strong...