Insurers have relied on historical data to design weather insurance contracts. In light of climate change, we examine the effects of this practice on the hedging effectiveness and profitability of insurance contracts. Using synthetic crop and weather data for today's and future climatic...

Using a choice experiment conducted among more than a thousand Swiss consumers, we analyze the individual demand for voluntary carbon offsets in different contexts. The analysis is used to identify the consumers’ underlying motives for offsetting emissions, the context effects on their...

This paper analyzes the optimal management of a natural resource that can shift between different dynamics at random times. Using a classical linear control model I investigate how the switching behavior influences the optimal extraction of the resource. I use exogenous sea-surface temperature...

Farmers' intentions about conversion to particularly animal-friendly stabling system (PAFS) are analyzed with a structural equation model. The Theory of Planned Behavior (ToPB, Ajzen 1985) is used as the theoretical basis of this study. Though ToPB is a well-defined theory, it is static rather...

This study investigates the impact of climate change adaptation on farm households’ downside risk exposure (e.g., risk of crop failure) in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia. The analysis relies on a moment-based specification of the stochastic production function. We estimate a simultaneous equations...

Project-based Emissions Trading Schemes, like the Clean Development Mechanism, are particularly prone to problems of asymmetric information between the project parties and the regulator. Given the specificities of these schemes, the regulator’s optimal monitoring strategy significantly differs...

In many developing countries, decentralization programmes for natural resource management aim to induce incentives for sustainable resource management at the local level. The effectiveness of such programmes has, however, suffered from weak property rights to the resource and by the presence of...

Regulating international externalities, like climate change, raises various enforcement problems. It is often argued that international price-based regulations (e.g. emission taxes) are more difficult to enforce than quantity-based regulations (e.g. tradable pollution permits). In this paper, we...