The Department of Economics, Economics Applied Microeconomics Seminar Series, and UCI Environment Institute present

"Optimal Global Dynamic Carbon Abatement"
with David Anthoff, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, U.C. Berkeley

May 17, 2011
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Social Sciences Plaza B, Room 3266

Anthoff investigates the optimal distribution of greenhouse gas emission reductions over time and between regions. Chichilnisky and Heal (1994) and Sandmo (2006) have shown that optimal marginal abatement costs differ between different countries if no lump-sum transfers between those countries are possible. Anthoff extends their static result to a dynamic stock externality, so that it can be applied to climate change and use the integrated assessment model FUND to compute optimal marginal carbon abatement costs schedules for sixteen world regions for the next century. If lump-sum transfers are not possible, rich countries should mitigate more and poor countries less. Ruling out lump-sum transfers has an ambiguous effect on optimal global emission reductions: under standard assumptions about inequality aversion, optimal emission reductions are lower if lump-sum transfers between countries are ruled out. But given a more inequality-averse decision maker, optimal emission reductions are larger when lump-sum transfers are ruled out.

David Anthoff is the Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, U. C. Berkeley. Previously he was a post doctoral associate of The Economic and Social Research Institute (Dublin) and a visiting research fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. pol.) in economics from the University of Hamburg (Germany) and the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modelling, an MSc in environmental change and management from the University of Oxford (UK) and an M.Phil. in philosophy, logic and theory of science from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Germany).

For further information, please contact Gloria Simpson, simpsong@uci.edu.