One channel through which environment is damaged is consumption. To protect environment, various product standards are introduced all over the world. By using a new economic geography framework, this paper explores the effects of environmental product standards on environment in a North-South trade model. We examine a situation in which North unilaterally introduces an environmental product sta...

We explore heat-related labor impacts both for their own interest and to understand the role of adaptation in responding to climate change. Focusing on non-agricultural sectors in the United States, we find that hot temperatures exert a causal negative impact on county-level payroll – reducing payroll by several percentage points in a 2◦C hotter year – with larger impacts in highly exposed indu...

We consider the climate-policy implications of non-constant time preferences when there is no commitment to future policies. The conceptual and quantitative results follow from the observation that, with time-declining discounting, the unusual delays and persistence of climate impacts provide a commitment device for climate policy-makers, overturning a fundamental climate-policy conclusion from...

When politicians negotiate in international climate conventions they may suffer from incomplete information about each other’s preferences about reaching an agreement. As is known, this may cause failure to reach an efficient cooperative agreement. We study the role of the clean development mechanism (CDM) for the likelihood of such failure. The CDM has been introduced in the context of the Kyo...

We investigate the optimal policy response to the possibility of abrupt, irreversible shifts in system dynamics. The welfare cost of a tipping point emerges from the policymaker’s response to altered system dynamics. Our policymaker also learns about a threshold’s location by observing the system’s response in each period. Simulations with a recursive, numerical climate-economy model show that ...

We analyze the policy implications of aversion to Knightian uncertainty (or ambiguity) about the possibility of tipping points. We demonstrate two channels through which uncertainty aversion affects optimal policy in the general setting. The first channel relates to the policy’s effect on the probability of tipping, and the second channel to its differential impact in the preand post-tipping re...

An open puzzle for climate-policy analysis is how policies could be made sensitive to climate change impacts spanning over centuries while keeping the shorterterm macroeconomic policies connected to the descriptive facts. We develop a tractable general-equilibrium model for climate-economy interactions with timedeclining pure discounting. The model resolves the puzzle: preferences over longterm...

Respondents reported willingness to pay (WTP) for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions after structured group discussion or without this deliberation. Deliberation did not affect mean or median WTP, but it increased the number of issues respondents considered, with some issues becoming more frequently considered and others less. Surveyonly respondents considered issues relevant for responding to...

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...