Economic Approaches to Understanding Change in Happiness Are people condemned to an inherent level of experienced happiness? A review of the economic research on subjective well-being gives reason to the assessment that happiness can change. First, empirical findings clearly indicate that people are not indifferent to adverse living conditions when reporting their subjective well-being as obser...

Economic Integration, Market Power and Technological Change We examine a common market which expands by integrating new regions. Capitalists are strategically interdependent through the goods market and they improve their productivity through R&D. Production and R&D employ unionized workers. The purpose of integration is to maximize a weighed average of workers’ and capitalists’ utilities. The ...

India is the fifth largest emitter of carbon dioxide but lacks a credible policy to address human induced climate change. Reluctance to take action is understandable in a country where per capita emissions are still a fraction of those in the US or Europe. However, in about 30 years, at present growth rates, India’s emissions will reach European per capita levels. At the Ninth Biennial Conferen...

Climate change is the alteration of climate directly or indirectly caused by human activities that modify the composition of the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases (GHG), particularly CO2, are accumulating in the atmosphere, with the consequent warming. Global mean temperature has risen since preindustrial times, with most of the warming occurring in the last three decades. The consequence are increa...

We present a new model for climate system analysis, called CLIMBER-2 (for CLIMate and BiosphERe, level 2). This model fills the current gap between simple, highly parameterized climate models and computationally expensive coupled models of global atmospheric and oceanic circulation. We outline the basic assumptions implicit in CLIMBER-2 and we present examples of climate system analysis includi...

The economic impact of climate change is usually measured as the amount by which the climate of a given period will affect output or GDP in that period. This paper draws attention to some of the dynamic effects through which climate change may affect economic growth and hence future output. In particular, the paper looks at saving and capital accumulation. With a constant savings rate, a lower ...

Agriculture is arguably the most important sector of the economy that is highly dependent on climate. A large body of scientific data and models have been developed to predict the impacts of the contemporary and future climate. Since the first IPCC Assessment Report was published in 1990, substantial efforts have been directed toward understanding climate change impacts on agricultural systems....

We introduce publicly funded education in R&D-based economic growth theory. The framework allows us to i) incorporate a realistic process of human capital accumulation for industrialized countries, ii) reconcile R&D-based growth theory with the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic prosperity and population growth, iii) revise the policy invariance result of semi-endogenous gr...