Thomas Eichner

Carbon Leakage, the Green Paradox, and Perfect Future Markets

Policies of lowering carbon demand may aggravate rather than alleviate climate change (green paradox). In a two-period three-country general equilibrium model with finite endowment of fossil fuel one country enforces an emissions cap in the first or second period. When that cap is tightened the extent of carbon leakage depends on the interaction of various parameters and elasticities. Conditions for the green paradox are specified. All determinants of carbon leakage resulting from tightening the first-period cap work in opposite direction when the second-period cap is tightened. Tightening the second-period cap does not necessarily lead to the green paradox.

Pricing the Ecosystem and Taxing Ecosystem Services: A General Equilibrium Approach

In an integrated dynamic general equilibrium model of the economy and the ecosystem humans and wildlife species compete for land and prey biomass. We introduce a competitive allocation mechanism in both submodels such that economic prices and ecosystem prices guide the allocation in the economy and in the ecosystem, respectively. We distinguish the scenarios of an open accessible habitat and a privately owned habitat. In both scenarios efficiency requires different corrective taxes/subsidies to internalize consumption services externalities. In the case of an open access habitat additional sources of inefficiency are the divergence of prices for biomass and land in both subsystems. Finally, we determine values of all components of the ecosystem in an efficient steady state with special emphasis on the role and the interplay of ecosystem and economic prices.

Multiple Risks and Mean-Variance Preferences

We analyze comparative static effects under uncertainty when a decision maker has mean-variance preferences and faces a generic, quasi-linear decision problem with both an endogenous risk and a background risk. In terms of mean-variance preferences, we fully characterize the effects of changes in the location, scale, and concordance parameters of the stochastic environment on optimal risk taking. Presupposing compatibility between the mean-variance and the expected-utility approach, we then translate these mean-variance properties into their analogues for von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions.

Variance Vulnerability, Background Risks, and Mean-Variance Preferences

An agent with two-parameter, mean-variance preferences is called variance vulnerable if an increase in the variance of an exogenous, independent background risk induces the agent to choose a lower level of risky activities. Variance vulnerability resembles the notion of risk vulnerability in the expected utility (EU) framework. First, we characterize variance vulnerability in terms of two-parameter utility functions. Second, we identify the multivariate normal as the only distribution such that EU- and two-parameter approach are compatible when independent background risks prevail. Third, presupposing normality, we show that—analogously to risk vulnerability—temperance is a necessary, and standardness and convex risk aversion are sufficient conditions for variance vulnerability.

Corrective Taxation For Curbing Pollution And Promoting Green Product Design And Recycling

In this paper we consider a competitive economy with flows of materials from extraction via recycling to landfilling which exhibits distortions due to pollution, external landfilling costs and inefficient product design. The allocative impact of tax-subsidy policies aiming at internalizing the distortions are analyzed when the pertinent tax-subsidy rates were successively raised from zero toward their efficiency restoring levels. Promoting recyclability by greening the product design stimulates recycling as expected. But it also increases primary material extraction and – possibly – the total waste flow, and it reduces the recycling ratio.

Increases in skewness and three-moment preferences

We call an agent skewness affine if and only if his marginal willingness to accept a risk increases when the distribution of the risk becomes more skewed to the right. Skewness affinity is shown to be equivalent to the marginal rate of substitution between mean and variance of wealth being decreasing in the skewness. This property allows us to characterize the comparative static effect of increases in the skewness in quasi-linear decision problems. Over domains of skewness-comparable lotteries skewness affinity is equivalent to the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility index of relative temperance being smaller than three.

A note on indifference curves in the (

Abstract. A numerical example employing a class of increasing absolute risk averse utility functions, the incomplete Euler gamma functions, proves that the slope of indifference curves in the (

\mu,\sigma

\mu,\sigma

)-space

)-space can be locally decreasing in

Global Environmental Agreements and International Trade: Asymmetry of Countries Matters

\sigma