This paper compares internationally-tradeable permits with a uniform carbon price, as seen through the lens of an individual country. To ensure a level playing field, these two approaches are initially calibrated to be welfare-equivalent for the country in a deterministic setting. While both...

Greenhouse gas abatement is a public good, so climate policy is a public-goods game and suffers from the free-rider incentives that make the outcome of such games notoriously uncooperative. Adopting an international agreement can change the nature of the game, reducing or exacerbating the...

We study optimal climate policy in a global economy where regions differ in wealth and climate vulnerability. Carbon emissions from production lead to output losses, and there is a technology for emissions absorption. We provide an aggregation result: the model with heterogeneity can be cast...

The Kyoto summit initiated an international game of cap and trade. Unlike a national policy, the essence of this game is the self-selection of national emission targets. This differs from the standard global public-goods game because targets are met in the context of a global carbon market. This...

Global cap and trade equalizes the price of emissions and leads to efficient abatement across countries, but sets the abatement level inefficiently low. It is set too low, because the global cap is the sum of individual country targets set on the basis of self-interest. The efficiency of a...

The international game of cap and trade begins when countries choose their quantity targets, which are largely selected according to self interest. The analogous public-goods game, in which countries choose their abatement levels, has an uncooperative outcome. Compared to that, the Nash...

We derive policy rules for a highly aggregated fossil-based world economy with two competing stochastic thresholds or tipping points. Current production generates emissions that add to a stock of GHGs that affect the probability distribution of hitting a climate threshold with severe...

We estimate carbon dioxide emissions for the 3401 electoral districts of the Republic of Ireland combining data from the Census, the Household Budget Survey, the National Accounts, Environmental Accounts, and the Labour Accounts. The source data is available for many countries, but we are not...

We analyse a principal-agent relationship in the context of international climate policy. Principals in two countries first decide whether to merge domestic emission permit markets to an international market, then delegate the domestic permit supply to an agent. We find that principals select...

In recent years, differences between traditional and green parties have been leveled with respect to climate protection. We show that this partial convergence in party platforms can be explained by international climate agreements, effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We set up a...