Recent thinking about the economics of climate change has concerned the uncertainty about the upper bound of both climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases and the damages that might occur at high temperatures. This argument suggests that the appropriate probability distributions for these factors may be fat-tailed. The matter of tail shape has important implications for the calculation of the so...

Focusing on tail effects — low probability but very adverse outcomes — I incorporate distributions for temperature change and its economic impact in an analysis of climate change policy. I estimate the fraction of consumption w(τ ) that society would be willing to sacrifice to ensure that any increase in temperature at a future point is limited to τ . Using information on the distributions for ...

Designing markets for pollution when damages vary across sources : Evidence from the NOx Budget Program. Existing and planned emissions trading programs are almost exclusively “emissions-based”, meaning that a permit can be used to o¤set a ton of pollution, regardless of where in the program region the ton is emitted. Designing programs in this way presumes that the health and environmental dam...

Following the Stern review of climate change the numerical choice of the social discount rate has been identified as one of the most crucial determinants of optimal policy recommendations for greenhouse gas mitigation policies. In this paper I point out two closely related contributions to the social discount rate in an uncertain world that have been overlooked in the debate. First, the standar...

The eBird database is the product of a huge citizen science project at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. Members report their birding excursions both their destinations and the numbers and types of birds they observe on each trip. Based on home address information, we calculate travel costs for each birder for trips to alternative birding hotspots. We focus on the Paci c Northwe...

We consider the strategic role of uncertainty and information acquisition for the mitigation of global warming which is modeled using a standard framework for private provision of a public good. Prior to the voluntary contribution mechanism, we allow for investments in information about the country-speci…c bene…t of reductions of the emissions of greenhouse gases. We show that information acqui...

Risk-Taking Behavior in the Wake of Natural Disasters We study whether natural disasters affect risk-taking behavior exploiting geographic variation in exposure to natural disasters. We conduct standard risk games (using real money) with randomly selected individuals in Indonesia and find that individuals who recently suffered a flood or earthquake exhibit more risk aversion than individuals li...

The prospects for cooperation on climate protection beyond 2012 are currently uncertain. Thus policy instruments which foster participation in International Environmental Agreements (IEA) are in demand. Among the instruments under discussion are trade sanctions. Multi-region optimal growth models are a state of the art tool for integrated assessment, but introducing trade sanctions distorts the...

We use a standard computable general equilibrium model to explore the fiscal implications of stringent carbon dioxide emission reduction in Europe. Both the immediate targets (2030% by 2020) and the medium-term targets (80-90% by 2050) for abatement can be met with a carbon tax that is modest to sizeable. Imposing budget neutrality, a carbon tax that would allow all other taxes to fall by 5% (2...

The dynamical model developed by us @Phys. Rev. C 54, 2660 ~1996!# has been applied to investigate the pion electroproduction reactions on the nucleon. It is found that the model can describe to a very large extent the recent data of p(e ,e8p) reaction from Jefferson Laboratory and MIT-Bates. The extracted magnetic dipole (M1), electric dipole (E2), and Coulomb (C2) strengths of the gN→D transi...