In 2010, the U.S. government adopted its first consistent estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC) for government-wide use in regulatory cost-benefit analysis. Here, we examine a number of the limitations of the estimates identified in the U.S. government report and elsewhere and review...

211 estimates of the social cost of carbon are included in a meta-analysis. The results confirm that a lower discount rate implies a higher estimate; and that higher estimates are found in the gray literature. It is also found that there is a downward trend in the economic impact estimates of the...

This paper derives the social cost of carbon (SCC) and its rate of change. It does so in a deterministic Ramsey model of optimal economic growth with carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. It is shown that the determinants of the rate of change of the SCC are substantially almost identical...

In some cost benefit analysis (CBA) applications, as for example valuation of climate change damages, distributional weights are used to account for diminishing utility of marginal income. This is usually done by intratemporal distributional weights, which are combined with discounting to...

The “social cost of carbon” (SCC) is the present value of the future stream of damages from one additional ton of carbon emissions in a particular year. This paper develops a simple model for calculating the SCC and compares estimates of the SCC under certainty and uncertainty. Our model...

The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative...

This report elucidates one aspect of economic IAMs: the damage function. Damage functions map environmental changes (primarily mean temperature increases) to economic impacts. This crucial step in the determination of SCC appears in very different form in the leading economic IAMs. Through...

The goal of this work is to improve the spatial representation of the Regional Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (RICE), in its '99 version, focusing on the Mediterranean countries, while also updating the calibration to the base year 2015. We evaluate the impact of climate...

We study how the scarcity of non-market goods, such as environmental amenities, affects the economic appraisal of climate policy. To this end, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the change in relative prices of non-market goods in the widespread climate-economy model DICE. We show that DICE...