In the context of emission trading it seems to be taken as given that people's preferences can be ignored with respect to the whole process of fixing emission targets and allocating emission permits to polluters. With this paper we want to reopen the debate on how citizens can be involved in...

We state efficiency conditions for the provision of congestable local public goods that diminish individual-specific proprietary risks. The optimum level of such a public service is determined by equating the sum of the reductions of the expected property losses due to a better service level...

Large-scale environmental programs generally commit substantial societal resources, making the evaluation of their actual effects on the relevant outcomes imperative. As the example of the subsidization of energy-saving appliances illustrates, much of the applied environmental economics...

The author analyzes the optimal investment in environmental protection in a model of an infinite series of non-overlapping hyperbolically discounting agents. He shows that without a commitment mechanism society is eventually stuck in a situation where all agents prefer further investment in the...

We present a tractable model of the effects of nonfinancial risk on intertemporal choice. Our purpose is to provide a simple framework that can be adopted in fields like representative-agent macroeconomics, corporate finance, or political economy, where most modelers have chosen not to...

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...

We consider a simple dynamic model of environmental taxation that exhibits time inconsistency. There are two categories of firms, Believers, who take the tax announcements made by the Regulator to face value, and Non-Believers, who perfectly anticipate the Regulator's decisions, albeit at a...

This paper explores the relationship between environmental protection and international capital movements, when tax policy is endogenous (through voting). A two-period general equilibrium model of a small open economy is specified to compare the effects of two different constitutions (commitment...