This paper argues that it is countries’ historical experience with democracy, the democratic capital stock, rather than current levels of democracy that determines current climate change policies. Empirical evidence using data starting as far back as year 1800 for 87 countries, which together...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...

An important source of political opposition to measures aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) arises from concerns over their negative effects on the competitiveness of domestic firms, especially those that are energy-intensive and exposed to competition from foreign producers....

Greenhouse gas policies confront the trade-off between the costs of reducing emissions and the benefits of avoided climate change. The risk of uncertain and potentially irreversible catastrophes is an important issue related to the latter, and one that has not yet been well incorporated into...

Many countries have pledged targets or actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; these have been listed in the Appendices to the Copenhagen Accord and, at the time of writing, are being transferred to the UNFCCC Cancún Agreements. This analysis examines the costs and effectiveness of these...

We analyze a repeated game in which countries are polluting as well as investing in technologies. While folk theorems point out that the first best can be sustained as a subgame-perfect equilibrium when the players are sufficiently patient, we derive the second best equilibrium when they are...

The Cancún Agreements formalise a collective commitment by developed countries to provide new and additional funding for action on climate change in developing countries both in the short- and longer-term. This collective financial commitment requires a system to measure, report and verify...

Developed countries have committed under the international negotiations to jointly mobilising USD 100 billion per year by 2020 for climate change mitigation and adaptation in developing countries. Yet consistent and comprehensive data to track this commitment are currently lacking. Such data...

The paper presents a dynamic game where players contribute to a public bad, invest in technologies, and write incomplete contracts. Despite the n 1 stocks in the model, the analysis is tractable and the symmetric Markov perfect equilibrium unique. If only the contribution levels are...

International climate negotiations have been troubled by mutual mistrust. At the same time, a hope seems to prevail that once enough countries moved forward, others would follow suit. If the abatement game faced by climate negotiators is a Prisoners' Dilemma, and countries are narrowly...