The paper compares the effects of market-based and command-and-control climate policies on the direction of technical change and the prevention of environmental disasters. Drawing on the model proposed in Acemoglu et al. (2012, American Economic Review), we show that market-based policies...

The concept of a circular economy has instilled substantial hopes that it will help forging patterns of resource use compatible with Planetary Boundaries. Many countries are implementing circularity policies to reduce wastes and emissions, while also fostering economic growth. Research and...

Not anytime soon. Using a novel dataset covering 127 countries and spanning two centuries, we find evidence for an energy Kuznets curve, with an initial decline of energy demand at low levels of per capita income followed by stages of acceleration and then saturation at high-income levels....

We analyze the role of electricity storage for technological innovations in electricity generation. We propose a directed technological change model of the electricity sector, where innovative firms develop better electricity storage solutions, which affect not only the relative competitiveness...

Financial times series, and commodity prices in particular, are known to exhibit fat tails in the distribution of prices. As with many natural resources price series, the arrival of new information can lead to unexpectedly rapid changes-or jump-in prices. This suggests that natural resource...

We examine the effect of natural resource exports on economic performance during the 1996-2011 period in the 15 independent countries that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. These countries were a largely homogeneous group with respect to social and institutional context; however, these...

How was the birth of "Environmental Economics" related to the first Earth Day fifty years ago (April 22, 1970)? This short note introduces some ideas about an amazing burst of intellectual activity from 1968 to 1974. Environmental economics was not a field of economics before this brief period,...

The present paper offers a short history of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) together with a brief account of its goals, operational structure, membership requirements and its role in regulating oil prices. Studying oil price developments and OPEC's role since its...

The governance of natural resource wealth is widely considered to constitute a key determinant in whether the extraction of natural resources proves to be a blessing or a curse. What is meant by governance can span a wide range of components, while the steps to achieving good governance remain...

The objective of this paper is to provide an axiomatic foundation to the concept of ecological footprint indices. For this purpose, we propose five axioms representing general properties which any ecological footprint measure should fulfill. It can be shown that there exists a unique index which...