Climate Treaties and Backstop Technologies

In this paper I examine the design of climate treaties when there exist two kinds of technology, a conventional abatement technology with (linearly) increasing marginal costs and a backstop technology (“air capture”) with high but constant marginal costs. I focus on situations in which countries can gain collectively by using both technologies. I show that, under some circumstances, countries will be better off negotiating treaties that are not cost-effective. When countries prefer to negotiate self-enforcing agreements that are cost-effective, the availability of the backstop technology causes cooperation in abatement to increase significantly.

Optimal Disease Eradication

Using a dynamic model of the control of an infectious disease, we derive the conditions under which eradication will be optimal. When eradication is feasible, the optimal program requires either a low vaccination rate or eradication. A high vaccination rate is never optimal. Under special conditions, the results are especially stark: the optimal policy is either not to vaccinate at all or to eradicate. Our analysis yields a cost-benefit rule for eradication, which we apply to the current initiative to eradicate polio.Eradication of infectious diseases; vaccination; control theory; cost-benefit analysis; poliomyelitis

Optimal Disease Eradication

Using a dynamic model of the control of an infectious disease, we derive the conditions under which eradication will be optimal. When eradication is feasible, the optimal program requires either a low vaccination rate or eradication. A high vaccination rate is never optimal. Under special conditions, the results are especially stark: the optimal policy is either not to vaccinate at all or to eradicate. Our analysis yields a cost-benefit rule for eradication, which we apply to the current initiative to eradicate polio.Eradication of infectious diseases, Vaccination, Control theory, Cost-benefit analysis, Poliomyelitis

13 + 1: A Comparison of Global Climate Change Policy Architectures

We critically review the Kyoto Protocol and thirteen alternative policy architectures for addressing the threat of global climate change. We employ six criteria to evaluate the policy proposals: environmental outcome, dynamic efficiency, cost effectiveness, equity, flexibility in the presence of new information, and incentives for participation and compliance. The Kyoto Protocol does not fare well on a number of criteria, but none of the alternative proposals fare well along all six dimensions. We identify several major themes among the alternative proposals: Kyoto is “too little, too fast”; developing countries should play a more substantial role and receive incentives to participate; implementation should focus on market-based approaches, especially those with price mechanisms; and participation and compliance incentives are inadequately addressed by most proposals. Our investigation reveals tensions among several of the evaluative criteria, such as between environmental outcome and efficiency, and between cost-effectiveness and incentives for participation and compliance.policy architecture, Kyoto Protocol, efficiency, cost effectiveness, equity,participation, compliance

Tipping versus Cooperating to Supply a Public Good

In some important multi-player situations, such as efforts to supply a global public good, players can choose the game they want to play. In this paper we conduct an experimental test of the decision to choose between a “tipping” game, in which every player wants to contribute to the public good provided enough other players contribute, and a prisoners’ dilemma, the classic cooperation game. In the prisoners’ dilemma, the first best outcome is attainable, but cannot be sustained as a Nash equilibrium. In the tipping game, only a second best outcome may be attainable, but there exists a Nash equilibrium that is strictly preferred to the one in the prisoners’ dilemma. We show that groups do significantly better when they choose the tipping game, and yet many groups repeatedly choose the prisoners’ dilemma, indicating a mistaken and persistent tendency to prefer a game with potentially higher payoffs to one having a strategic advantage

Characteristics of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and East Pacific.

In this dissertation, I present a series of investigations to expand our understanding of TCs in the East Pacific and North Atlantic basins. First, I developed and applied a climatological tool that quickly and succinctly displays the spread of historical TC tracks for any point in the North Atlantic basin. This tool is useful in all parts of a basin because it is derived from prior storm motion trajectories and summarily captures the historical synoptic and mesoscale steering patterns. It displays the strength of the climatological signal and allow for rapid qualitative comparison between historical TC tracks and NWP models. Second, I have used a robust statistical technique to quantify the relationships between fifteen different metrics of TC activity in nine ocean basins and twelve climate indices of the leading modes of atmospheric and oceanic variability. In a thorough, encyclopedic manner, over 12,000 Spearman rank correlation coefficients were calculated and examined to identify relationships between TCs and their environment. This investigation was not limited to the East Pacific or North Atlantic, and new climatic associations were found between seasonal levels of TC activity and the major climate indices across the nine basins. This information is critical to forecasters, economists, actuaries, energy traders, and societal planners who apply knowledge of levels of TC activity on intraseasonal to interdecadal timescales. The statistics are also valuable to climatologists seeking to understand how regional TC frequency will change as the global climate warms. Third, I have examined the leading intraseasonal mode of atmospheric and oceanic variability, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), and discovered statistically significant relationships with the frequency of TC genesis, intensification, and landfall over the nine basins. Like the significance of the longer-period oscillations to the frequency of TC activity on intraseasonal and longer timescales, these results are highly relevant to the problem of short-term (one- to two-week) predictability of TC activity. These three investigations demonstrate the utility of historical datasets across a wide range of applications, from short-term forecasting to climate studies. In this way, the results highlighted in this dissertation represent a significant and positive contribution to meteorology. Collectively, they reveal multiple characteristics of TCs in the East Pacific and North Atlantic and provide greater understanding of the complex interactions between TCs and their surrounding larger-scale environment

Essays in Energy and Environmental Economics

This dissertation includes three essays related to energy and environmental economics, with an emphasis on policy. Topics discussed pertain to policies aimed at internalizing externalities, or encouraging adaptation to climate change. I discuss these topics in the context of the transportation sector, natural disaster insurance, and infrastructure policy. I analyze consumer behavior in a vehicle arms race—where preferences for safety lead to strategic purchases of large vehicles—as a potential contributing factor to the rise in vehicle sizes in the U.S. First, I test for arms race purchasing behavior by exploiting quasi-random next-door neighbor fatalities in fatal car accidents in order to examine how shifts in preferences for safety impact demand for heavy vehicles. I find that households neighboring an individual who dies in an accident respond by purchasing significantly larger and safer vehicles than households neighboring someone who survives an accident. Second, I explore how gasoline taxes counteract arms race behavior by estimating a discrete choice model of vehicle purchases, allowing for consumer preferences on relative weight. My specification allows preferences for vehicle size to vary based on the size of cars in the households’ area. Counterfactual simulations illustrate that an arms race can be reversed with a sufficiently high Pigouvian tax, which will depend on the distribution of vehicle weights, specific to the area. The next study examines the unintended role government policies can play in discouraging climate change adaptation. Despite the large costs of covering flood losses, little is known about whether flood insurance availability affects the decision to live and stay in more flood-prone areas. In this paper, we present evidence that suggests households in flood-prone areas would have otherwise moved to less risky areas absent flood insurance availability. We identify the effect of flood insurance availability on population flows by exploiting the within- and across-county variation in the various programs that the federal government implemented to encourage flood-prone areas to join the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Results suggest that flood insurance availability caused population to increase by 4 to 5 percent in high flood-risk counties. Furthermore, we find that NFIP causes a 4.4% increase in population per one standard deviation increase in risk. Finally, I analyze how infrastructure policy may encourage coal plants to convert to clean natural gas energy. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) have imposed significant costs on coal-fired power plants in recent years. To many old, inefficient coal plants, high costs of compliance have prompted a trend toward conversions to natural gas—a much cleaner source of energy. Transportation frictions may inhibit some of these conversions from taking place. In this paper, I analyze the role that the natural gas pipeline infrastructure plays in incentivizing these conversions. Exploiting MATS’ increased pressure on coal electric generating units (EGUs) with capacity 25 megawatts or greater within a triple-differences framework, I estimate that a 10% reduction in pipeline distance produces an additional 6.4% increase in likelihood of conversion for an EGU regulated under MATS. Isolating the impact of pipeline costs within a dynamic model of the plant’s decision to convert (still fully exploiting MATS), I find that pipeline subsidies alone can produce one-third of the conversions as emissions reduction mandates under MATS, and present value of external benefits of $10.1 billion from reduced emissions. In addition, I estimate a marginal benefit of$2.6 million per-mile of pipeline