We contribute to the literature on private financing of intergenerational public goods, focusing on climate change mitigation. We consider, in a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with environmental externalities, a contract between successive generations, whereby agents of...

We consider international negotiations on the level of global pollution, and examine the Lindahl solution which determines the distribution of the pollution permits with unanimous agreement. We show various properties to clarify difficulties to achieve a Pareto efficient allocation as an...

This essay revisits the question of instrument choice for the regulation of externalities in the context of climate change. The central point is that the Pigouvian prescription to equate marginal control costs with the expected marginal benefits of damage reduction should guide the design of...

The Great Tōhoku-Earthquake and the following nuclear meltdown in Fukushima called the world's attention to Japans' energy and climate policy. Japan is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouses gases in the world and still far away from reaching its Kyoto target. Emissions trading systems have...

All forms of renewable energy are at an inflection point. Falling costs, changing technology, and new environmental and climate regulations have all moved to exponentially increase the growth of renewable energy. How legal terms, such as "qualifying facility" under PURPA are interpreted and...

This paper studies the relationship between green funds and firms' attention to sustainability. By using a natural language processing algorithm that extracts topics from texts, we measure the extent to which firms talk about sustainable energy during earnings conference calls. We use our...

A brief review of long run projections of demand for road transport suggests that problems related to road network congestion and greenhouse gas emissions are likely to become more pressing than they are now. Hence we review, from a macroscopic perspective, popular policy measures to address...

This paper discusses lessons that other regions could learn from European Union's effort to implement carbon pricing through EU Emission Trading System (EU ETS). Our lessons are, first of all, that a cap-and-trade system like EU ETS is very helpful in guaranteeing a credible and binding...

Solar geoengineering has received increasing attention as an option to temporarily stabilize global temperatures. A key concern surrounding these technologies is that heterogeneous preferences over the optimal amount of cooling combined with low deployment costs may allow the country with the...

We analyse a principal-agent relationship in the context of international climate policy. Principals in identical countries first decide whether to join an international environmental agreement (IEA), then delegate the domestic emission choices to an agent. Finally, agents in all countries...