Arbitrary targets for greenhouse gas emissions neglect well-accepted concepts of decision making under uncertainty. Optimal policy design would account for the costs and benefits associated with various policy options and targets for greenhouse gas reductions, as well as the uncertainty inherent...

This study’s ultimate goal is to analyze environmental performance (EP) at firm level and the effectiveness of environmental policy along with other possible determinants. Especially, the empirical analysis aims at exploring the relationship between the actual EP of firms in terms of CO2...

The development of unconventional gas extraction has led to significant declines in gas prices, recently followed by a large drop of oil prices. This is also the year which is supposed to deliver the long awaited post 2020 climate agreement. This article brings different pieces of research...

This paper explores the implications of climate change for industrial policy (IP). Five implications are discussed, namely the need for international coordination of IPs; for putting human development, and not emission targets, as the overriding objective of low-carbon IP; of stimulating...

Carbon budgets have emerged as a robust metric of warming, but little is known about the usefulness of regional carbon budgets as indicators of policy. This article explores the potential of regional carbon budgets to inform climate policy. Using the large database of scenarios from IPCC AR5...

This paper compares the optimal dynamic choices between policies of mitigation and adaptation for three economies: Brazil, Chile and the United States. The focus is on the optimal role of mitigation and adaptation for “environmentally small economies,” i.e., economies that are witnessing an...

Theoretical analysis and empirical evidence show that leadership behavior in climate policy through increased abatement efforts or international transfers cannot be expected to be very successful. In this paper we instead show that pioneering activities, which are based on green technological...

Our purpose is to analyse the effectiveness and efficiency of a Partial Climate Agreement with open entry under a non-cooperative Nash-Equilibrium framework. We evaluate a partial agreement policy in which non-signatory countries can decide to join or to leave a coalition of the willing at any...

In this paper we update previous work that categorizes foreign aid projects in terms of their likely impact on the natural environment. We then document trends in the global distribution of environmental aid over time and show that environmental aid has increasingly focussed on global...