The design of environmental policy typically takes place within a framework in which uncertainty over the future impact of pollution and two different kinds of irreversibilities interact. The first kind of irreversibility concerns the sunk cost of environmental degradation; the second is related...

Environmental economics has employed the seminal contribution of Ronald H. Coase (1960) intensively but has remained relatively unaffected by the contributions of perhaps his most influential follower, Oliver E. Williamson. As an initial step in addressing this oversight, we apply the analytical...

To decarbonize the power sector policy-makers need to commit to long-term credible rules for climate and energy policy. Otherwise, time-inconsistent policy-making will impair investments into low-carbon technologies. However, the future benefits and costs of decarbonization are subject to...

Popular discussions of environmentally-motivated policies include much talk about job loss that can be confusing. Does job loss in a polluting industry mean that others should endure dirty air or that complementary policies are needed? I make sense of the issue by drawing concepts from research...

We study the profitability of horizontal mergers in nonrenewable resource industries, which account for a large proportion of merger activities worldwide. Each firm owns a private stock of the resource and uses open-loop strategies when choosing its extraction path. We analytically show that...

We introduce the link between pollution, morbidity and productivity over the life-cycle in a two-period overlapping generations model. As the environmental tax improves the health-profile over the life-cycle, it influences saving, investment in health, labor supply and retirement. As a result,...

We present an extended integrated assessment model (IAM) that optimizes climate financing policies over multiple phases of discrete policy action. We build on Semmler et al. (2018) which develops a single-phase model of the optimal allocation of infrastructure expenditure to carbon-neutral...

We first study the optimality of a committed policy mix of tax and subsidy to control pollution when firms are involved in abatement technology R&D that is subject to knowledge spillovers. Then a comparison of tax and subsidy is provided when the policy mix is not available and the regulator can...

Under capital tax competition, surprisingly, Ogawa and Wildasin (2009, American Economic Review, 99(4), 1206-1217) find that uncoordinated policymaking leads to a first-best outcome even in the presence of transboundary pollution.However, I show that if the level of environmental regulation is...

We examine an open economy's strategy to reduce its carbon emissions by replacing its consumption of coal - very carbon intensive - with gas - less so. Unlike the standard analysis of carbon leakage, unilateral carbon-reduction policies with more than one carbon energy source may turn...