Despite ambitious climate goals and already substantial stocks of developed fossil energy reserves, development of new fossil energy reserves continues to be high. This raises concerns, as it reinforces the fossil industry’s opportunities and incentives to continue extraction, and may...

Conventional wisdom argues that environmental policy is less costly if environmental policy induces the development of cleaner technologies. In contrast to this argument, we show that the cost of environmental policy (a reduction in emissions) may be larger with induced technical change than...

Production often causes pollution as a by-product. Once pollution problems become too severe, regulation is introduced by political authorities which forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production processes. We model this transition as a change in "general purpose technology"...

We argue that expectations about future energy use affect the transition from fossil fuels to renewable substitutes, because of an interaction between innovation and resource scarcity. The paper presents a model of directed technical change to study this interaction. We find that resource-saving...

Production often causes pollution as a by-product. Once environmental degradation becomes too severe, regulation is introduced by which society forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production processes. We model this transition as a change in "general purpose technology" and...