We derive a R&D-based growth model where the rate of technological progress depends, inter alia, on the amount of technological opportunity. Incremental innovations provide direct increases to the knowledge stock but they reduce technological opportunity and thus the potential for further...

We develop an overlapping generations model with environmental quality and endogenous environmental culture. Based upon empirical evidence, preferences over culturally-weighted consumption and envi- ronmental quality are assumed to follow a Leontie function. We fi nd that four diff erent regimes...

In this article we study the implication of thresholds in preferences. To model this we extend the basic model of John and Pecchenino (1994) by allowing the current level of environmental quality to have a discrete impact on how an agent trades off future consumption and environmental quality....

The objective is to show that endogenous discounting models should use a felicity function constrained to a positive domain. A variety of articles use the Mangasarian or Arrow and Kurz condition as a sufficient condition for optimality, which restricts felicity to a negative domain. Since the...

Ecolabeling is a means of reducing the information gap between consumers and producers. We study the implication of ecolabeling a supposedly green good for a consumer's allocation of income between a dirty and the supposedly green good. In the model, the role of the ecolabel is to help product...

This article analyzes an economy where both nonrenewable resources and a costly energy resource are essential inputs in production. The extraction of the nonrenewable resources leads to emissions that increase the probability of a catastrophe. We find that, in contrast to the...

The results in this paper show that a policy maker who ignores regional data and instead relies on aggregated integrated assessment models will strongly underestimate the carbon price and thus the required climate policy. Using a stylized theoretical model we show that, under the mild and...

We investigate the leverage cycle in Luxembourg’s banking sector using individual bank-level data for the period 2003 Q1–2010 Q1. One of our findings is that Luxembourg’s banks have a procyclical leverage. This procyclicality is not due to marking-to-market but because Luxembourg’s banks...

The results in this paper show that the level of aggregation used in a social welfare func- tion matters significantly for policy analysis. Using climate change as an example, it is shown that, under the mild and widely-accepted assumptions of asymmetric climate change impacts and declining...