There has been a recent economic literature arguing that international environmental agreements (IEAs) can have no real effect, on account of their voluntary and self-enforcing nature. This literature concludes that the terms of IEAs are the codification of the noncooperative equilibrium, and...

Scientific and economic consensus increasingly points to the need for a credible and cost-effective approach to address the threat of global climate change, but the Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change appears incapable of inducing significant participation and...

Reduction of the earth’s biodiversity as a result of human activities is a matter of great concern to prominent scientists. What are the economic aspects of this loss? In economic terms, what is biodiversity and why might it matter? And is the loss of biodiversity in any way connected 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 -...

We provide a novel methodology for estimating time-varying weights in linear prediction pools, which we call dynamic pools, and use it to investigate the relative forecasting performance of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, with and without financial frictions, for output...

Cruise shipping has first established as the transportation of pleasure-seeking upper class travellers on seagoing vessels offering one or more ports of call in the United States and the Caribbean. Today this is a highly efficient global business. Modern specialised ships - radically different...

A group of agents wants to reform the status quo if and only if this is Pareto improving. Agents have private information and may have common or private objectives, which creates a tension between information aggregation and minority protection. We analyze a simple voting system - majority rule...

While the impact of exchange rate changes on economic growth has long been an issue of key importance in international macroeconomics, it has received renewed attention in recent years, owing to weaker growth rates and the debate on "currency wars". However, in spite of its prevalence in the...