Global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty with learning. We provide stochastic dominance theorems that provide new insights into when abatement and investment into low carbon technology should increase in risk. We show that R&D into low-carbon technologies and near-term abatement are in some sense opposites in terms of risk. Abatement provides insuran...

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...

Taking advantage of the structure of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), we study the tradeoff between efficiency and equity associated with different levels of discretionary power when delegating regulatory authority to lower levels of government. Exploiting an instrumental variables approach, we provide evidence that the benefits of the 1990 CAAA were highly localized and accrued dispro...

Environmental conditional cash transfers are popular but their impacts are not well understood. We evaluate land cover and wealth impacts of a federal program that pays landowners for protecting forest. Panel data for program beneficiaries and rejected applicants allows us to control for fixed differences and time trends affecting both groups. We find the program reduces the expected land cover...

Economists generally view environmental enforcement as a tool to secure compliance with regulations. This paper demonstrates that credible enforcement significantly increases statutory over-compliance with regulations as well. We find that many plants with discharges typically below legally permitted levels reduce discharges further when regulators issue fines, even on other plants. Also, non-c...

We analyze bargaining over international climate agreements in a setting with incomplete information about abatement costs. Incomplete information is known as one of the key reasons why negotiations may fail more generally, and why efficiency gains cannot be exploited. We ask whether unilateral commitment to high abatement reduces or increases the likelihood for an efficient negotiation outcome...

Recently Acemolgu, Aghion, Bursztyn and Hemous (AER 2012) formulated a model in which a high macroeconomic elasticity of substitution between clean and dirty production represents a crucial condition for green growth. Until now it has never been systematically estimated. Using a novel panel of cross-country sectoral data, we formulate specifications of nested CES production functions that allow...

Previous research on landowner willingness to retire land into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is based on cross-sectional data prior to 2002. Using enrollment data on a CRP subprogram from 1998 to 2010 we find that incentives matter more for pasture than cropland, and we find that counties producing cattle respond more strongly to current incentives. We also see an idiosyncratic lack of...

Taking advantage of the structure of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), we study the tradeoff between efficiency and equity associated with different levels of discretionary power when delegating regulatory authority to lower levels of government. Exploiting an instrumental variables approach, we provide evidence that the benefits of the 1990 CAAA were highly localized and accrued dispro...

We investigate the long-run impact of environmental regulations on the intraindustry distribution of firm-level productivity and the resulting aggregate variables. In a general-equilibrium model that accounts for endogenous entry/exit of heterogeneous firms, neither the average productivity of firms nor the mass of firms is independent of the choice of policy instruments (i.e. emissions tax vs....