Suggestions on international cooperation in climate policy beyond 2012 include substi-tuting or complementing international environmental agreements (IEA) with technologyoriented agreements (TOA). We look at the impact of TOA on environmental cooperationin the framework of coalition stability. Using a numerical model, we analyze the differ-ences of several TOA and how they inter...

Providing clean and affordable water to meet human needs is a grand challenge of the 21st century. Worldwide, water supply struggles to keep up with the fast growing demand, which is exacerbated by population growth, global climate change, and water quality deterioration. The need for technological innovation to enable integrated water management cannot be overstated. Nanotechnology holds great...

Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been characterized by deindustrialization. Conventional economists argue that this is due to a bad environment for business decision making. This paper provides a classical explanation for deindustrialization, the failure to solve the food problem. That is, food staple prices have risen rapidly resulting in labor becoming costly, although physically abu...

We study the importance for climate policy of uncertainty concerning the gravity of climate change and thus the benefits of abatement. In particular, this uncertainty can have different effects on the benefits of early abatement and R&D. We explore these differences, which depend in large part on the curvature of the marginal abatement cost function—prudence, in other words. With convex margina...

This case tells the true story of a university employee who suffered from color blindness and who, although he had been an exceptional employee, was terminated when he could not read the color screens displayed by the newly installed PeopleSoft system. Moral outrage on the campus initiated a process that ultimately resulted in Hal Richards being offered another position in which his talents cou...

Technological change can be understood in terms of technological evolution. Because of this evolutionary aspect, a number of scholars have made analogies between technological innovation and biological evolution (Ziman, 2000). As technological advancement has played a crucial role in industrial development, almost every nation is concerned with monitoring technological change. Technology polici...

Constructing total factor productivity growth numbers free of the effects of business cycle variations is, as the large recent literature on the topic has shown, a difficult exercise. But the trend evolutions are clear. In most countries, TFP growth has been lower-often much lower-than it was before the mid-1970s. And the decrease in the underlying TFP growth rate appears to have been quite abr...

New technologies have allowed …rms to monitor low-skill workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. We show that this ’power-biased change’may generate rising wage inequality and increases in the work intensity and unemployment of low-skill workers. JEL numbers: J31, O33