This paper prices the risk of climate change by calculating a lower bound for the price of a virtual insurance policy against climate risks associated with the business as usual (BAU) emissions path. In analogy with ordinary insurance pricing, this price depends on the current risk to which...

In 2010, the U.S. government adopted its first consistent estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC) for government-wide use in regulatory cost-benefit analysis. Here, we examine a number of the limitations of the estimates identified in the U.S. government report and elsewhere and review...

The effects of climate change on natural systems will be substantial, wide-spread, and likely irreversible. Warmer temperatures and changing precipitation patterns have already contributed to forest dieback and pushed some species towards extinction. Natural systems contribute to human welfare...

Weitzman's Dismal Theorem has that the expected net present value of a stock problem with a stochastic growth rate with unknown variance is unbounded. Cost-benefit analysis can therefore not be applied to greenhouse gas emission control. We use the Generalized Central Limit Theorem to show that...

The European Union's Emissions Trading System is the largest system in the world for trade in greenhouse gases. It used to be a cap-and-trade scheme with a fixed supply of permits. However, a recent reform of the system "punctures the waterbed" by making the supply of permits endogenous. The...

The seminal contributions of William Nordhaus to scholarship on the long-run macroeconomics of global climate change are clear. Much more challenging to identify are the impacts of Nordhaus and his research on public policy in this domain. We examine three conceptually distinct pathways for that...

This paper studies a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model involving climate change. Our frame- work allows for feedback effects on the temperature dynamics. We are able to match estimates of future temperature distributions provided in the fifth assessment report of the IPCC (2014). We...

This paper finds that it is optimal to start a long-term emission-reduction strategy with significant short-term abatement investment, even if the optimal carbon price starts low and grows progressively over time. Moreover, optimal marginal abatement investment costs differ across sectors of the...

Over the last few decades, integrated assessment models (IAM) have provided insight into the relationship between climate change, economy, and climate policies. The limitations of these models in capturing uncertainty in climate parameters, heterogeneity in damages and policies, have given rise...

The objective of this paper is to critically assess the use simple rules for the social cost of carbon (SCC) employing a rudimentary form of the Ramsey rule. Two interrelated caveats apply. First, if climate change poses a serious problem, it is hard to justify an exogenous constant growth rate...