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...

This essay revisits the question of instrument choice for the regulation of externalities in the context of climate change. The central point is that the Pigouvian prescription to equate marginal control costs with the expected marginal benefits of damage reduction should guide the design of...

Carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere is becoming an important option to achieve net zero climate targets. This paper develops a welfare and public economics perspective on optimal policies for carbon removal and storage in non-permanent sinks like forests, soil, oceans, wood products or...

We focus on the optimal timing of climate change mitigation policies, a decision which is complicated by multiple sources of irreversibility or inertia. The pertinence of Real Option Theory in understanding the optimal amount of necessary precautionary behavior is explored, as are the results...

What do markets for voluntary climate protection imply about people's valuations of en- vironmental protection? I study this question in a large-scale field experiment (N=255,000) with a delivery service, where customers are offered carbon offsets that compensate for emissions. To estimate...

We present a modification of the most commonly used integrated assessment model (IAM) of climate change (DICE-2016), AD-DICE2016, which is designed to address three key aspects of climateeconomy models: treatment of uncertainty, the use of more appropriate utility functions, and including...

Under which conditions unilateral tightening of climate policy causes a weak or strong green paradox or even decreases social welfare has recently been studied by Hoel (2011). Hoel assumes that the costs of extracting fossil fuel are linear in output. We extend his model by allowing for...

After twenty years of global negotiations, the world is still far from a comprehensive climate agreement. The "top-down" approach embodied by the Kyoto Protocol has all but stalled, chiefly due to disagreements over levels of ambition and objections to financial transfers. To avoid those...

The economic prescription for climate change is clear: price carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions to internalize climate damages. In practice, a variety of political economy constraints prevent the introduction of a carbon price equal to the full social cost of emissions. This...

This paper contributes to the economic literature on pure and impure public goods by considering two alternatives for contributing to the public good climate protection: compensating carbon emissions from conventional consumption or paying higher prices for climate-friendly products. We...