International climate negotiations take place in a setting where uncertainties regarding the impacts of climate change are very large. In this paper, we examine the influence of increasing the probability and impact of large climate change damages, also known as the 'fat tail', on the formation...

International climate negotiations take place in a setting where uncertainties regarding the impacts of climate change are very large. In this paper, we examine the influence of increasing the probability and impact of large climate change damages, also known as the ‘fat tail’, on the...

Results derived from empirical analyses on the stability of climate coalitions are usually very sensitive to the large uncertainties associated with the benefits and costs of climate policies. This paper provides the methodology of Stability Likelihood that links uncertainty about benefits and...

Several studies found ancillary benefits of environmental policy to be of considerable size. These additional private benefits imply not only higher cooperative but also noncooperative abatement targets. However, beyond these largely undisputed important quantitative effects, there are...

Analyses of public goods regularly address the case of pure public goods. However, a large number of (international) public goods exhibit characteristics of different degrees of publicness, i.e. they are impure public goods. In our analysis of transfers helping to overcome the inefficient...

I develop a dynamic model of private provision of public bads allowing investments in technologies. The analysis is tractable and the MPE unique. The framework is used to derive optimal incomplete contracts in a dynamic setting. While the noncooperative equilibrium is very inefficient,...

Countries often have private information about their willingness to pay for protecting the climate system and their cost of emission reductions. We use a principal-agent model to re-examine the economic case for unilateral action by individual countries, in our case of the principal. We find...

Theoretical analysis and empirical evidence show that leadership behavior in climate policy through increased abatement efforts or international transfers cannot be expected to be very successful. In this paper we instead show that pioneering activities, which are based on green technological...

In order to overcome the underprovision of global public goods various different policy approaches have been proposed. In the climate policy arena, international transfers are frequently seen as an effective means to raise the provision of the global public good ‘climate change mitigation’....