The paper develops an analytic integrated assessment model of climate change (AIAM). The model enhances our current understanding of climate policy and explains crucial relations to the broader audience. Is the first quantitative analytic model comprising all the relevant components of its numeric deterministic counterparts used in policy advising. The model comes with a new framework to addres...

We examine whether property price differentials reflecting flood risk increase following a large flood event, and whether this change is temporary or permanent. We use single-family residential property sales in Dougherty County, Georgia, between 1985 and 2004 in a difference-in-differences spatial hedonic model framework. After the 1994 “flood of the century,” prices of properties in the 100ye...

We model dynamic mechanisms for a global commons. Countries benefit from both consumption and aggregate conservation of an open access resource. A country’s relative value of consumption-to-conservation is privately observed and evolves stochastically. An optimal quota maximizes world welfare subject to being implementable by Perfect Bayesian equilibria. With complete information, the optimal q...

The success of global climate policies over the coming decades depends on the diffusion of ’green’ technologies. This requires that international environmental agreements (IEAs) and trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) interact productively. Using a simple and tractable model, we highlight the strategic reduction in abatement commitments on account of a hold-up effect. In anticipa...

This paper argues that life satisfaction data can be used to value natural disasters. We discuss the strengths of this approach, compare it to traditional methods and apply it to estimate and monetize utility losses caused by floods in 17 OECD countries between 1973 and 2004. Using combined cross-section and time-series data, we find a negative impact of floods on life satisfaction that is size...

Williamson (1965) argued that catching up countries experiencing strong national growth tend also to see a widening in regional disparities, whereas in more developed economies strong national growth and falling regional disparities could go hand in hand. We find some evidence of a trade-off between national growth and regional dispersion in the EU’s Cohesion countries, notably in Spain and Ire...

In this introduction the editors showcase the papers by way of a structured project and seek to clarify the two key concepts cited in the title. We consider the history of the idea that knowledge is an economic factor, and discuss the question of whether regions provide the relevant system of reference for knowledge-based economic development. Current transformations in university-industry-gove...

This paper has two main objectives. First, it estimates the impact of related and unrelated variety of European regions’ knowledge structure on their patenting activity. Second, it looks at the role of technological relatedness and extra-local knowledge acquisitions for local innovative activity. Specifically, it assesses how external technological relatedness affects regional innovation perfor...

This paper aims at re-assessing the relationship between innovation and economic growth by questioning the view equating knowledge to innovation and to regional growth. We rather propose that these linkages are highly differentiated at the regional level and explore this relationship for 262 NUTS2 European regions. Our results confirm that knowledge and innovation are both important drivers of ...

In this paper we aim at studying to what extent spillovers between firms may foster economic growth. The attention is addressed to the spillovers connected with the R&D activity that improves the quality of the goods firms supply. Our model develops a growth theory framework and we assume that firms spread around a circle. Our study assesses that spillovers between neighbors affect the probabil...