We use Hurricane Katrina’s damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a cost shock. We find storm damage had a “cleansing” effect on businesses: damaged establishments that returned to operation were more resilient than those that had never been damaged. This effect is particularly strong for establishments belonging to younger...

This paper posits the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic “World Climate Assembly” that votes on global carbon emissions via the basic principle of majority rule. Two variants are considered. One is to vote on a universal price (or tax) that is internationally harmonized, but the proceeds from which are domestically retained. The other is to vote on the overall quantity of total worldw...

The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative modifications of the Ramsey rule to account for this. Taking the Ramsey rule as given, I derive an intuitiv...

The United States Government recently developed a range of values representing the monetized global damages associated with an incremental increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, commonly referred to as the social cost of carbon (SCC). These values are currently used in benefit-cost analyses to assess potential federal regulations. For 2010, the central value of the SCC is $21 per ton of CO...

This paper examines the effects of firm-level innovation in carbon-abatement technologies on optimal cap-and-trade schemes with and without price controls. We characterize optimal cap-and-trade regulation with price cap and price floor, and compare it to the special cases of pure taxation and simple emissions cap. Innovation shifts the tradeoff between priceand quantity-based instruments toward...

This paper examines empirically whether nonlinearities play a significant role in the modeling of the carbon price. We highlight the limits of previous carbon markets analyses based essentially on a linear econometric framework. Instead, we propose to revisit the main results on carbon pricing and the inter-relationships with energy markets and CERs based on nonlinear techniques (threshold vect...

Convergence in cross country per capita carbon emission rates is an important concept in the climate change debate. This paper provides an empirical analysis of emissions per capita convergence. This analysis is crucial to the assessment of projection models that generate convergence in emission per capita rates and to the assessment of policy proposals that advocate imposing convergence in emi...

This paper builds a two-country (North, South), two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good is produced with a clean and a dirty input. A temporary Northern policy combining clean research subsidies and a trade tax can ensure sustainable growth but Northern ...

Does charitable giving respond to new demands, and if so, does the response come at the expense of other charitable causes? To answer these questions we exploit exogenous variation in need arising from the random event of a nearby tornado. We use location fixed effects estimators and examine changes in charitable donations claimed for tax deductions in IRS data on individual income taxes by geo...

Recent! research! in!both! the! social! and!natural! sciences!has!been!devoted! to! increasing!our! ability!to!predict!disasters,!prepare!for!them!and!mitigate!their!costs.!Curiously,!we!appear!to! know!very!little!about!the!fiscal!consequences!of!disasters.!The!likely!fiscal!impact!of!a!natural! disaster! has! not! been! examined! before! in! any! comparable! or! comparative! framework.! We! e...