508 research outputs found
Priority for the Worse Off and the Social Cost of Carbon
The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using a discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (SWF)—one that simply adds up the well-being numbers (utilities) of individuals, as discounted by a weighting factor that decreases with time. The discounted-utilitarian SWF has been criticized both for ignoring the distribution of well-being, and for including an arbitrary preference for earlier generations. Here, we use a prioritarian SWF, with no time-discount factor, to calculate the SCC in the integrated assessment model RICE. Prioritarianism is a well-developed concept in ethics and theoretical welfare economics, but has been, thus far, little used in climate scholarship. The core idea is to give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse off individuals. We find substantial differences between the discounted-utilitarian and non-discounted prioritarian SCC
Discounting Climate Change
* The ideas I apply here were presented in my Plenary Lecture to the World Congress o
A glimpse into the differential topology and geometry of optimal transport
This note exposes the differential topology and geometry underlying some of
the basic phenomena of optimal transportation. It surveys basic questions
concerning Monge maps and Kantorovich measures: existence and regularity of the
former, uniqueness of the latter, and estimates for the dimension of its
support, as well as the associated linear programming duality. It shows the
answers to these questions concern the differential geometry and topology of
the chosen transportation cost. It also establishes new connections --- some
heuristic and others rigorous --- based on the properties of the
cross-difference of this cost, and its Taylor expansion at the diagonal.Comment: 27 page
Housing Transfer Taxes and Household Mobility: Distortion on the Housing or Labour Market?
The intellectual influence of economic journals: quality versus quantity
The evaluation of scientific output has a key role in the allocation of
research funds and academic positions. Decisions are often based on quality indicators
for academic journals, and over the years, a handful of scoring methods have
been proposed for this purpose. Discussing the most prominent methods (de facto
standards) we show that they do not distinguish quality from quantity at article level.
The systematic bias we find is analytically tractable and implies that the methods are
manipulable. We introduce modified methods that correct for this bias, and use them
to provide rankings of economic journals. Our methodology is transparent; our results
are replicable
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