We address one aspect of the treatment of technical change in the environmental economics literature: how technical change impacts the marginal cost of abatement. We review a selection of papers that employ a variety of representations of technical change, and show that these representations...

Public policy response to global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty. Theoretical work has shown that explicitly accounting for uncertainty and learning in climate change can have a large impact on optimal policy, especially technology policy. However,...

Using an optimal control model, we explore the reaction of a firm's optimal investment into an R&D program that aims at non-carbon technologies under uncertainties about a future carbon tax. We find; first, that the influence of risk on investment decisions depends on model formulation. Second,...

This paper analyzes the connection between informal insurance institutions in rural Africa and the adoption of new technologies. We model two linked games -- a community risk-sharing game and an old-age insurance game -- and analyze the multiple equilibria that arise. We provide a numerical...

Until recently endogenous technical change and uncertainty have been modeled separately in climate policy models. In this paper, we review the emerging literature that considers both these elements together. Taken as a whole the literature indicates that explicitly including uncertainty has...