The paper deals with rent-seeking behaviour among agents competing for future shares of a common renewable natural resource. Rent-seeking might become profitable when the agents expect that the distribution of the natural resource in future periods will be dependent on the agents’ extraction of the resource in the past, even though high exploitation might reduce the stock that future individual...

We analyze a dynamic multi-pollutant problem where abatement costs of several pollutants are not separable. The pollutants can be either technological substitutes or complements. Environmental damage is induced by the stock of accumulated pollution. We find that optimal emission paths are qualitatively different for substitutes and complements. We derive general properties governing optimal emi...

We develop a conceptual framework for valuing biodiversity from an economic perspective. We argue for a dynamic economic welfare measure of biodiversity that complements the literature on beneŽ t-cost approaches and genetic distance/phylogenic tree approaches. Using a uniŽ ed model of optimal economic management of an ecosystem under ecological and genetic constraints, we identify gains from ma...

We develop a differential game within a general equilibrium framework of carbon sequestration with and without international trade. We characterize the game’s equilibrium and demonstrate how a global carbon permit market can be structured to induce the participation of developing countries through the harnessing of their potential to sequester carbon. We show that a permit market with carbon se...

This paper explores how wealth and inequality can affect self-governed solutions to commons dilemmas by constraining group cooperation. It reports a series of experiments in the field where subjects are actual commons users. Household data about the participants’ context explain statistically the usually observed wide variation found within and across groups in similar experiments. Participants...

We study the optimal emission standards under uncertain pollution damages and transaction costs associated with policy changes in a dynamic setting. We consider three alternative forms of transactions costs and show that they can lead to different kinds of delays of policy changes or smaller scales of these changes. Thus, policy persistence can be a rational response of forward-looking policy m...