Recent literature on biofuels has questioned whether biofuels policies are likely to reduce the negative effects of climate change. Our analysis explicitly takes into account that oil is a non-renewable natural resource. A blending mandate has no effect on total cumulative oil extraction....

This paper studies the aggregate distribution of declared opinions and behavior when heterogeneous individuals make the trade-off between being true to their private opinions and conforming to an endogenous social norm. The model sheds light on how various punishment regimes induce conformity or...

This paper shows that peer pressure may lead to dynamic convergence to a norm that is skewed with respect to preferences in society, yet is endogenously upheld by the population. Moreover, a skewed norm will often be more sustainable than a representative norm. This may explain the skewness of...

This paper shows that a seemingly simple assumption, regarding the time horizon of economic agents, can reconcile the puzzling long run price dynamics of exhaustible resources such as oil, gas and metals. It does so by exploring the possibility that economic agents use a rolling planning...

I explore possible impacts of reciprocal preferences on participation in international environmental agreements. Reciprocal countries condition their willingness to abate on others' abatement. No participation is always stable. A full or majority coalition can be stable, provided that...

This paper considers the role which selfish, moral and social incentives and pressures play in explaining the extent to which stated choices over pro-environment behaviours vary across individuals. The empirical context is choices over household waste contracts and recycling actions in Poland. A...

Estimates of poverty are highly sensitive to price and income measures across time and space. This paper offers a complementary approach to traditional poverty measurement that ensures comparability: we use nighttime light as a proxy for poverty measurement. We measure the percentage of...

Trade with differentiated goods normally provides a form of insurance against disasters, such as floods and fires, through an increasing relative price of goods from the a­fflicted country. With open access renewable resources this is reversed. A country hit by a negative shock recovers faster...

When doing two-way fixed effects OLS estimations, both the variances and covariance of the fixed effects are biased. A formula for a bias correction is known, but in large datasets it involves inverses of impractically large matrices. We detail how to compute the bias correction in this case.

In 2007, the Norwegian government reformed the vehicle registration tax in order to reduce the CO2 emissions intensity of the new car fleet by incentivizing the purchase of more fuel efficient cars. This paper identifies the impact of the new tax structure on four dimensions: 1) the average CO2...