Cars, carbon taxes and CO2 emissions
Is a carbon tax effective in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, and thereby mitigating climate change? This paper is one of the first empirical analyses of this question and the … read more »
Publication type: Working papers
Methods for strengthening a weak instrument in the case of a persistent treatment
When evaluating policy treatments that are persistent and endogenous, available instrumental variables often exhibit more variation over time than the treatment variable. This leads to a weak instrumental variable problem, … read more »
International patent families: from application strategies to statistical indicators
This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of international patent families, including their domestic component. The authors exploit a relatively under-studied feature of patent families, namely the number … read more »
Social discounting: the SOC/STP divide
More than 50 years of social discounting literature have not delivered satisfactory academic guidance to government practitioners. Users of the social opportunity cost (SOC) paradigm do not always appreciate that … read more »
The cost of adapting to climate change: evidence from the US residential sector
Using household-level data from the American Housing Survey, this paper assesses the cost of adapting housing to temperature increases. The authors account for both energy use adjustments and capital adjustments … read more »
A new approach to an age-old problem: solving externalities by incenting workers directly
Understanding motivations in the workplace remains of utmost import as economies around the world rely on increases in labor productivity to foster sustainable economic growth. The authors of this paper … read more »
Developing an Input–Output based method to estimate a national-level EROI
Concerns have been raised that declining energy return on investment (EROI) from fossil fuels and low levels of EROI for alternative energy sources could constrain the ability of national economies to continue to deliver economic growth and improvements in social wellbeing. However, in order to test these concerns on a national scale, there is a […]
Was von Thünen right? Cattle intensification and deforestation in Brazil
This paper examines whether patterns of cattle intensification, deforestation, and pasture expansion in the Brazilian state of Rondonia are consistent with the land rent framework, in which location and distance to markets are key determinants of rents. A panel dataset of household lots, collected between 1996 and 2009, is used to test the hypothesis that […]
Valuing predictability
How important is it to be able to predict the distant future? The authors of this paper study this question in a model of an agent who operates in a … read more »
Cooperation in the climate commons
This paper surveys the existing empirical evidence on the scope for cooperation in the climate commons and on the effectiveness of possible interventions to spur it. Given the global public … read more »