Welfare measures under threats of environmental catastrophes are studied using the "“parable”" apparatus of Weitzman and Lofgren [22]. The occurrence probability of the catastrophic event is driven (at least partly) by anthropogenic activities such as natural resource exploitation. Without...

Unintended consequences of a pre-announced climate policy have been studied in a variety of situations. We show that early announcement of a carbon tax gives rise to a 'Green-Paradox', in that it increases polluting emissions in the interim period (between announcement and actual...

We survey the rapidly growing economic literature on environmental catastrophes and the various approaches developed to address the hovering threats. Various theoretical descriptions of catastrophic occurrences are classified with respect to the uncertain conditions that trigger the events, the...

We develop a method to characterize the location as well as the time of approach of optimal steady states in single-state, infinite-horizon, autonomous models. The method is based on a simple function of the state variable which is defined in terms of the model's primitives. The actual...