It is now well known that "optimal" government policies may not be time consistent--that is, ex post optimal. Time consistency considerations can be shown to reverse the conclusions about the relative merits of different tax structures that are drawn from Ramsey type analysis. In this paper I...

Intergenerational altruism and contemporaneous cooperation are both important to the provision of long-lived public goods. Equilibrium climate protection may depend more sensitively on either of these considerations, depending on the type of policy rule one examines. This conclusion is based on...

The Chichilnisky criterion is an explicit social welfare function that satisfies compelling conditions of intergenerational equity. However, it is time inconsistent and has no optimal solution in the Ramsey model. By investigating stationary Markov equilibria in the game that generations with...