CHANGE The MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change is an organization for research, independent policy analysis, and public education in global environmental change. It seeks to provide leadership in understanding scientific, economic, and ecological aspects of this difficult issue, and combining them into policy assessments that serve the needs of ongoing national and inte...

Climate change is the exemplary global public good, because each country’s emissions of greenhouse gases contribute cumulatively to the increase of the overall concentration, and each country’s abatements entail higher cost than benefit, unless effective concerted collective actions take place. Unfortunately there are weak political and economic instruments for entering a climate agreement and ...

The policy recommendations ofmost economists are based on the rational actormodel. The emphasis is on achieving efficient allocation by insuring that property rights are completely assigned and that market failures are corrected. This paper takes the position that so-called behavioral “anomalies” are central to human decision-making and, therefore, should be the starting point for effective eco...

Climate scientists note that the effects of climate change vary regionally. Citizen willingness to absorb the costs of adaptation and mitigation policies may correspond with these place-specific effects. Geographic information systems (GIS) analytic techniques are used to map and measure survey respondents’ climate change risk at various levels of spatial resolution and precision. Spatial data ...

This paper presents evidence on structural change in Turkey and provides an overview of the evolution of industrial policy in the last three decades. Turkey has experienced substantial growth in labor productivity in the last decade. About two thirds of the increase in aggregate labor productivity arises from reallocation of employment from low to high productivity sectors and one third from pr...

Most OECD countries are committed to reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases There is increasing scientific consensus that global warming is under way, linked at least in part to human economic activity. The considerable attention paid to this problem over the past ten years resulted not least from the 1992 United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Despite this a...

What is the impact of surprise and anticipated policy changes when agents form expectations using adaptive learning rather than rational expectations? We examine this issue using the standard stochastic real business cycle model with lump-sum taxes. Agents combine knowledge about future policy with econometric forecasts of future wages and interest rates. Dynamics under learning can have large ...

The impact of growth management policy through zoning ordinances on land-use and -cover change is a topic of increasing interest, especially with regard to urban sprawl and forest and agricultural land preservation. As urban and residential land use is quickly replacing extractive land use in southern Indiana, implementation of growth management policy has become a topic of great debate. This a...

1 INTRODUCTION As the fi nancial crisis continues to take its toll on the global economy, another serious challenge looms large: preventing the planet from warming more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Policymakers are now faced with the daunting task of stimulating growth without using carbon-intensive practices and stabilizing the climate without dampening economic recovery. If the fi nancial cri...