Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such...

A central issue in climate policy is the question whether long-term targets for green- house gas emissions should be adopted. This paper analyzes strategic effects related to the timing of such commitments. Using a two-country model, we identify a redistributive effect that undermines long-term...

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...

We propose a novel mechanism for coalitional policies in a climate coalition. In our proposed setup, national (unilateral) and federal (multinational) emission policies coexist. A joint federal institution, appointed by all members, sets a joint emission policy for its members and must attain...

Nitrogen management policies introduced in the past decades by some OECD countries have succeeded in reducing excess nitrogen use by farmers, but half of global mineral fertiliser use is still lost for crops. While about half of OECD countries have nutrient surpluses of between 25-50 kg N per...

Global warming can be curbed by pricing carbon emissions and thus substituting fossil fuel with renewable energy consumption. Breakthrough technologies (e.g., fusion energy) can reduce the cost of such policies. However, the chance of such a technology coming to market depends on investment. We...

A formula is derived for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that takes account of intragenerational income inequality and its evolution with economic growth. The social discount rate (SDR) should be adjusted to account for intragenerational and intergenerational inequality aversion and for risk...

Global warming is an example of a global tragedy of the commons. The atmosphere is a global common property resource. The global nature of this resource makes global warming a particularly difficult problem to solve. The reason for this is that there is no world government that can introduce and...

It is widely believed that an environmental tax (price regulation) and cap-and-trade (quantity regulation) are equally efficient in controlling pollution when there is no uncertainty. We show that this is not the case if some consumers (firms, local governments) are morally concerned about...

Global warming can be curbed by pricing carbon emissions and thus substituting fossil fuel with renewable energy consumption. Breakthrough technologies (e.g., fusion energy) can reduce the cost of such policies. However, the chance of such a technology coming to market depends on investment. We...