Tag Archives: Externality

In the Quarterly Journal of Economics (137, 4), a group of authors estimates that the mean global increase in mortality risk due to climate change, accounting for adaptation benefits and costs, is valued at roughly 3.2% of global GDP in 2100 under a high-emissions scenario. Notably, today’s cold locations are projected to benefit, while today’s poor and hot locations have large projected damages. Finally, our central estimates indicate that the release of an additional ton of CO2 today...

Finanz und Wirtschaft, December 9, 2020. PDF. Economic policy is not about GDP growth. It’s about welfare. Externalities are key. Infection externalities don’t go away by calling for responsible behavior. Infection externalities can turn positive. Keeping worthy companies or networks alive does not require government intervention, unless capital markets don’t work. To judge the right amount of burden sharing is beyond economics. But economics gives some clues: In an ideal world,...

In his Nobel lecture (reprinted in the June issue of the American Economic Review), William Nordhaus concludes that we should focus on four goals: First, people around the world need to understand and accept … Those who understand the issue must speak up and debate contrarians who spread false and tendentious reasoning. … Second, nations must establish policies that raise the price of CO2 and other greenhouse-gas emissions. … Moreover, we need to ensure that actions are global and not...

Farmers in Switzerland receive about CHF 2.7 billion in direct financial support annually. Total financial support by the federal and cantonal governments equals more than CHF 4 billion. But according to a report published by Zurich based think tank Avenir Suisse, this financial support constitutes just a minor part of the transfers from society at large to farmers, due to explicit and implicit subsidies, privileges, and—most importantly—negative externalities. A list of privileges...

Farmers in Switzerland receive about CHF 2.7 billion in direct financial support annually. Total financial support by the federal and cantonal governments equals more than CHF 4 billion. But according to a report published by Zurich based think tank Avenir Suisse, this financial support constitutes just a minor part of the transfers from society at large to farmers, due to explicit and implicit subsidies, privileges, and—most importantly—negative externalities. A list of privileges...

Finanz und Wirtschaft, December 13, 2017. PDF. Ökonomenstimme, December 15, 2017. HTML. Regulation is about aligning private and social trade-offs. When banks cause negative externalities, good regulatory interventions increase banks’ costs. Externalities may differ across countries, so nothing suggests that regulation induced costs should be the same internationally.

In Econometrica, Emmanuel Farhi and Iván Werning neatly summarize how their work on demand externalities fits in the literature. … pecuniary externalities, which were first shown to arise when a simple friction, market incompleteness, is introduced into the Arrow–Debreu framework (see, e.g., Hart (1975), Stiglitz (1982), Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1985), Geanakoplos, Magill, Quinzii, and Dreze (1990)). The logic is as follows. When asset markets are incomplete and there is more than...