Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a model of this situation and shows when a small probability that some future government...

I investigate when a flexible bargaining agenda, where side payments are possible, facilitates cooperation in a context with strategic delegation. On the one hand, allowing side payments may be necessary when one party's participation constraint otherwise would be violated. On the other, with...

Why do rational politicians choose inefficient policy instruments? Environmental regulation, for example, often takes the form of technology standards and quotas even when cost-effective Pigou taxes are available. To shed light on this puzzle, we present a stochastic game with multiple...

For markets to work, buyers must know when products are of high quality. This paper provides a theoretical framework for studying the consequences of the certifier's identity, the characteristics of the best certifier, and the identity of the equilibrium certifier. A certifier that cares about...

We characterize the optimal policy and policy instruments for self-enforcing treaties when countries invest in green technology before they pollute. If the discount factor is too small to support the first best, then both emissions and investments will be larger than in the first best, when...

In recent decades, democratic countries have signed hundreds of international environmental agreements (IEAs). Most of these agreements, however, are weak: they generally do not include effective enforcement or monitoring mechanisms. This is a puzzle in standard economic models. To study this...