Observers repeatedly predict that climate change will lead and is already causing massive migration with very large numbers of people forced to leave their homes in cataclysmic waves of climate refugees. Yet, most of the empirical research on the contemporary link between climate change and...

This paper surveys the recent literature devoted to the analysis of the interactions between the adoption of voluntary or negotiated agreements as a tool of environmental policy and market structure. The goal of this survey is twofold. On the one hand, we would like to identify the market...

This paper examines the effects of county-level urbanization and natural amenities on subjective well-being (SWB) in the U.S. SWB is measured using individual-level data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) which asks respondents to rate their overall life satisfaction....

Composite indicators are becoming increasingly infuential tools of environmental assessment and advocacy. Nonetheless, their use is controversial as they often rely on ad-hoc and theoretically problematic assumptions regarding normalization, aggregation, and weighting. Nonparametric data...

In recent years, extensive literature on the Environmental Kuznets Curve leading to optimistic policy conclusions has attracted great attention. However, the underlying cross-section estimations are not very reliable. Accordingly, this contribution uses time series data for a single country with...

This paper studies the incentives for international cooperation if (some) countries prefer a more equitable distribution of per capita emission levels. The impact of such an equity preference is analyzed first for a bilateral, and then for a multilateral environmental problem. We show that -...

The motivations of the Arab Spring that have marked the history of humanity over the last few months have left political economists, researchers, governments and international policymakers pondering over how the quality of political institutions affect consumer welfare in terms of commodity...

Prices of commodities, including metals, energy and agricultural products, rose markedly over the 2009 - 2010 period. Some observers have attributed a significant part of this increase in commodity prices to the U.S. Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs. Using event-study...

A system of tradable permits in the standard setting is effective in attaining the policy objective with regard to pollution reduction at the least cost. This outcome is challenged in case of a tradable permit system in a federal state with individual states having discretionary power regarding...

Recent research has shown that economic conditions have an important effect on real commodity prices. We quantify the contribution of fluctuations in inflation to this particular link. In the data, a temporary rise in inflation causes real commodity prices to rise, as does a rise in trend...