Uncertainty about long-term climate policy is a major driving force in the evolution of the carbon market price. Since this price enters the investment decision process of regulated firms, this uncertainty increases the cost of capital for investors and might deter investments into new technologies at the company level. We apply a real options-based approach to assess the impact of climate chan...

In this paper we discuss the role of solar electricity as well as the relative importance of concentrating solar power (CSP) and photovoltaics (PV) for reaching cost-optimal energy related greenhouse gas abatement under the constraint of a 2°C climate protection target. We use the hybrid energy-economy-climate model ReMIND to analyze the use of solar electricity to understand which parameters d...

The optimal investment to mitigate climate change crucially depends on the discount rate used to evaluate the investment’s uncertain future benefits. The appropriate discount rate is a function of the horizon over which these benefits accrue and the riskiness of the investment. In this paper, we estimate the term structure of discount rates for an important risky asset class, real estate, up to...

Venture capital syndication (VCS), an investment model, is gaining increasing attention. This paper uses a new perspective on knowledge transfer to explore the influence mechanism of heterogeneity in VCS innovation performance (IP) entrepreneurial firms. We use firm-year panel data from Shenzhen Stock Exchange for 2000–2017 and find that includes, at least, management heterogeneity, technical h...

What is the best way to incorporate a risk premium into the discount rate schedule for a real investment project with uncertain payo¤s? The standard CAPM formula suggests a beta-weighted average of the return on a safe investment and the mean return on an economy-wide representative risky investment. Suppose, though, that the project constitutes a tail-hedged investment, meaning that it is expe...

Public policy response to global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty. Theoretical work has shown that explicitly accounting for uncertainty and learning in climate change can have a large impact on optimal policy, especially technology policy. However, theory also shows that the specific impacts of uncertainty are ambiguous. In this paper, we provide a...

Climate exerts a profound influence on the lives of rural populations, particularly the rural poor, who depend on agriculture for livelihood and sustenance, who are unprotected against climate-related diseases, who lack secure access to water and food, and who are vulnerable to hydrometeorological hazard. Climate shocks such as drought and flooding lead not only to loss of life, but also long-t...

The research at University College London School of Medicine (UCLSM) is supported by the Wellcome Trust, Action Research, the Special Trustees of University College Hospital, and the Muscular Dystrophy Group of Great Britain. The studies have been carried out with the assistance of Dr. P. S. Tofts, Mr. D. Delpy and Mr. A. Chu of the Department of Medical Physics (UCLSM), and Mr. N.Taylor of Kin...