As human societies grapple with the scarcity of environmental resources—clean water, biodiversity, and atmospheric quality—environmental markets will achieve an important role in the global economy. Along with markets for knowledge, they may become the most important institutions in the...

We study a growth model with an environmental asset which is a source of utility and an input to consumption and production. The stock of this asset follows its own ecological dynamics, which are affected by economic activity. We study the implications of an approach to ranking sequences of...

We present a restriction on the domain of individual preferences that is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of a social choice rule that is continuous, anonymous, and respects unanimity. The restriction is that the space of preferences be contractible. Contractibility admits a...

Oil price behavior has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. These changes can be explained rather simply in terms of the delayed responses of supply and demand to prices, and in terms of changes in the rate of discovery of reserves. This analysis can be used to forecast possible future...

This paper reviews a range of issues relating to tradeable carbon dioxide quotas. It considers the economic principles on which they are based, compares them with alternative carbon abatement policies, and reviews many aspects of how tradeable quotas would be implemented in practice ...<BR><P>Cette...</p>

We review the optimal pattern of carbon emission abatements across countries in a simple multi-country world. We model explicitly the fact that the atmosphere is a public good. Within this framework we establish conditions for it to be necessary for optimality that the marginal cost of abatement...

We provide a simple construction of social choice rules for economies with infinite populations. The rules are continuous, Pareto and non-dictatorial; they are constructed as limits of individual preferences when the limit exists, and otherwise as adequate generalizations. This contrasts with...

We consider an economy which imports energy from a monopolistic price-setter. The domestic general equilibrium of this economy adjusts in response to the price of energy. We define the total cross price elasticity of demand between energy and capital as the cross price elasticity across general...

Ws use growth models with natural resources to study the con- sequences of a ranking of intertemporal paths, due to Chichilnisky, which places weight on their very long run or limiting characteristics as well as on their characteristics over any finite period. This criterion shows more...