To Go or Not to Go: Migration Alleviates Climate Damages Even for Those Who Stay Behind

We examine the effect of climate change on fertility rates and human capital accumulation in developing countries, focusing on the instrumental role of migration. In particular, we investigate how climate-induced migration in developing countries will affect those who do not migrate. Holding all else constant, climate shocks raise the return to acquiring skills, because skilled individuals compared to unskilled ones have greater opportunity to migrate after the shock. In response to this change in incentives, parents choose to invest more in education and have less children, a process known as the ‘quantity-quality’ trade-off. These effects partially offset the damages of climate change, even for those who do not migrate

Quantifying Non-Cooperative Climate Engineering

The mismatch between actions to combat climate change, which are based on voluntary national initiatives of limited effort, and the recognition of the importance of global warming is growing. Climate engineering via solar radiation management has been proposed as a possible complement to traditional climate policies. However, climate engineering entails specific risks, including its governance. Free driving, the possibility of unilateral climate engineering to the detriment of other nations, has been recently proposed as a potentially powerful additional externality to the traditional free riding one (Weitzman, 2015). This paper provides the first quantitative evaluation of the risks of free driving. Our results indicate that in a strategic setting there is significant over-provision (by almost an order of magnitude) of climate engineering above what is socially optimal, resulting in a sub-optimal global climate. Regions with high climate change impacts, most notably India and developing Asia, deploy climate engineering at the expenses of other regions