The transition from autocracy to democracy may lead a country to break-up. The break-ups of the USSR and Yugoslavia led to sharp falls in emissions. If something similar would happen in China, projected emissions would fall by 50% or more. Break-up uncertainty dominates other scenario uncertainty.

We develop a climate-economy model with active learning. We consider three ways of active learning: improved observations, adding observations from the past and improved theory from climate research. From the model, we find that the decision maker invests a significant amount of money in climate...

We generalize Wirl’s (JEEM, 2009) “oligopoly meets oligopsony” model of a permit market for the case of heterogeneous players. Both oligopolists and oligopsonists reduce welfare by restricting trade. Having both in the market reinforces this. However, oligopolists seek to increase the...

This paper applies the Ijiri-Simon test for systematic deviations from Gibrat’s Law to citation numbers of economists. It is found that often-cited researchers attract a new citation numbers that are disproportionate to the quality of their work. It is also found that this Matthew Effect is...

Agriculture employs 60% of workers in rural Indonesia whose crop production and incomes are threatened by variation in climatic conditions. Delayed monsoon onset related to El Niño is likely to become more frequent with climate change. Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey, IFLS, this paper...

A general consensus has emerged that while the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) raised the pay of low wage workers it did little to harm their employment prospects. This is in contrast to the US and other countries where a debate over minimum wage effects still rages on. We re-examine the evidence...

Most functions of economic impact assume that climate change is smooth. We here propose impact functions that have stochastic climate change as an input. These functions are identical in shape and have similar parameters as do deterministic impact functions. The mean stochastic impacts are thus...

I estimate the cost of meeting the EU 2030 targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction, using statistical emulators of ten alternative models. Assuming a first-best policy implementation, I find that total and marginal costs are modest. The statistical emulators allow me to compute the risk...

The vast majority of households in low-income countries cook with firewood, which is known to produce various airborne toxins. We examine whether cooking with firewood results in poorer respiratory health by using a unique Indonesian household survey that collected direct measures of lung...

Climate change will probably have a limited impact on the economy and human welfare in the 21st century. The initial impacts of climate change may well be positive. In the long run, the negative impacts dominate the positive ones. Negative impacts will be substantially greater in poorer, hotter,...