This paper takes sustainability to be a matter of intergenerational welfare equality and examines whether an optimal development path can also be sustainable. It argues that the general "zero-net-aggregate-investment" condition for an optimal development path to be sustainable in the sense of...

The paper reexamines the ethics of intergenerational risk. When risk re-solves gradually, earlier decisions cannot depend on the realization of later shocks and, consequently, some inequalities across generations are inevitable. To account for these inequalities, risky intergenerational...

I study the egalitarian way of distributing resources across generations. Distributional equity deeply conflicts with the Pareto principle: efficient allocations cannot guarantee that i) each generation be assigned a consumption bundle that is at least as large as an arbitrarily small fraction...

The paper reexamines the welfare economics of intergenerational risk. Risk and its resolution over time are modeled as a decision tree: in each period, the consumption of the current one-period living generation is to be traded-off against uncertain benefits of future generations; as time...

We propose a new and tractable model of fairness preferences to understand how leaders' often stated goal of intergenerational fairness influences their actions. We parameterize two distinct dimensions of fairness preferences, deterministic and stochastic fairness, to capture the heterogeneity...

Suppose that there exists a positive (exogenous) probability that at each date of a possibly infinite future, the human species will disappear. We postulate an Ethical Observer (EO) who must solve an intertemporal welfare maximization problem under this kind of uncertainty, with preferences that...

This paper takes sustainability to be a matter of intergenerational welfare equality and examines whether an optimal development path can also be sustainable. It argues that the general "zero-net-aggregate-investment" condition for an optimal development path to be sustainable in the sense of...

Concerns about fairness among countries remain significant obstacles to a stronger global climate treaty. This paper addresses the distributional implications of two mechanisms to strengthen the Paris Agreement: the incorporation of national carbon pricing, and the tightening of nationally...

The paper reexamines the welfare economics of intergenerational risk. Risk and its resolution over time are modeled as a decision tree: in each period, the consumption of the current one-period living generation is to be traded-off against uncertain benefits of future generations; as time...

Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in efforts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial...