The paper derives the optimal carbon tax in closed-form from an integrated assessment of climate change. The formula shows how carbon, temperature, and economic dynamics quantify the optimal mitigation effort. The model's descriptive power is comparable to numeric models used in policy advising....

This paper discusses techniques for measuring the incidence of carbon taxes across different household income groups and provides some cross-country estimates of these effects for selected advanced countries. The general message of this paper is that distributional concerns should not...

Climate policy has been mainly studied with economic models that assume representative, rational agents. However, it aims at changing behavior associated with carbon-intensive goods that are often subject to bounded rationality and social preferences, such as status and imitation. Here we use a...

This paper explains how, in the context of incomplete coordination among all countries, unilateral policies that might at first sight seem pro-green could actually turn out to harm the global environment. The free-riding motives and the difficulty of reaching an effective international...

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...

The green paradox conveys the idea that climate policies may have unintended side effects when taking into account the reaction of fossil fuel suppliers. In particular, carbon taxes that will be implemented in the future induce resource owners to extract more rapidly which increases present...

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...

This paper shifts the perspective of the recent green paradox literature towards the demand side. Based on a simple model, I show that a subsidy on input factors in a Cobb-Douglas production function may contribute substantially to postponing resource extraction into the future and, thereby, to...

The green paradox conveys the idea that climate policies may have unintended side effects when taking into account the reaction of fossil fuel suppliers. In particular, carbon taxes that will be implemented in the future induce resource owners to extract more rapidly which increases present...