This paper studies within a multi-country model with international trade the stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs) when countries regulate carbon emissions either by taxes or caps. Regardless of whether coalitions play Nash or are Stackelberg leaders the principal message is...

The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement fall short of the abatement needed to reach the 2°C target. Emissions trading could be a "costless" means to reduce the ambition gap if countries used their gains from trade for additional abatement. However, this requires...

We reassess the well-known "narrow-but-deep" versus "broad-but-shallow" trade-off in international environmental agreements (IEAs), taking into account the principal-agent relationship induced by the hierarchical structure of international policy. To this end, we expand the modest coalition...

We reassess the well-known "narrow-but-deep" versus "broad-but-shallow" trade-off in international environmental agreements (IEAs), taking into account the principal-agent relationship induced by the hierarchical structure of international policy. To this end, we expand the modest coalition...

The Kyoto summit initiated an international game of cap and trade. Unlike a national policy, the essence of this game is the self-selection of national emission targets. This differs from the standard global public-goods game because targets are met in the context of a global carbon market. This...

I explore possible impacts of reciprocal preferences on participation in international environmental agreements. Reciprocal countries condition their willingness to abate on others' abatement. No participation is always stable. A full or majority coalition can be stable, provided that...

International climate negotiations have been troubled by mutual mistrust. At the same time, a hope seems to prevail that once enough countries moved forward, others would follow suit. If the abatement game faced by climate negotiators is a Prisoners' Dilemma, and countries are narrowly...

Countries often have private information about their willingness to pay for protecting the climate system and their cost of emission reductions. We use a principal-agent model to re-examine the economic case for unilateral action by individual countries, in our case of the principal. We find...

Consider a situation in which countries anticipate an international environmental agreement (IEA) to be in effect sometime in the future. What is the impact of the future IEA on current emissions after its announcement? We show that the answer to this question is ambiguous. We examine four types...

We analyze a repeated game in which countries are polluting as well as investing in technologies. While folk theorems point out that the first best can be sustained as a subgame-perfect equilibrium when the players are sufficiently patient, we derive the second best equilibrium when they are...