Conference Agenda

The limited expansion of the U.S. natural gas pipeline network has created supply and deliverability bottlenecks in energy markets. Ongoing calls for reform, in turn, often cite surging costs and delays arising from the pipeline permitting process. Yet, reform proposals motivated by rising cost may mischaracterize the problem if they do not accont for the incentives facing pipeline operators under cost-of-service regulation. Drawing on the complete administrative record of US gas pipeline permitting, I show that public comments are not associated with capacity-adjusted costs, but are associated with increases in project duration. Comments from environmental groups, tribal governments, landowners, and commercial firms have varying associations with costs but could offset each other, yielding less impact on pipeline decisions as a society. These findings provide new evidence on  rm and interest group strategies in the political economy surrounding infrastructure permitting.

This paper examines the effects of CORSIA on international aviation CO2 emissions, using novel flight-level emissions data estimated from actual fuel usage. Compared to the baseline year of 2019, when CORSIA became effective in 2024, the time series event study results show that flight-level CO2 emissions on the routes subject to compliance reduced by 7.85 tonnes (13.9%), which is equivalent to removing about two passenger vehicles for a year, indicating airlines’ efforts to curb CO2 emissions. Compliance by airlines based in CORSIA member states yields a positive spillover effect on the non-CORSIA-applicable routes they operate on. Specifically, Difference-in-Differences (DID) results show that, compared with non-CORSIA-based peers, CORSIA-based airlines’ flight-level CO2 emissions are 3.71 tonnes (6%) lower, owing to having more aircraft equipped with fuel-efficiency devices and a younger fleet. Specifically, for every 1000 aircraft, CORSIA-based airlines have 66 more aircraft installed with fuel-efficiency devices.

Global warming, ecological decline and inequalities are interconnected, yet rarely studied jointly. We investigate how damages to the environment change the social cost of inequalities , and how inequalities influence the social value of ecosystem services. We show that the answer depends on two parameters: inequality aversion, and substitutability between market goods and environmental goods. When both parameters are high, inequality increases the marginal value of the environment. This is not always the case when both parameters are low. We quantify this interaction by building a climate-economy model that includes ecosystem services and features both national and international inequalities. In our main calibration, the presence of national inequality doubles the marginal social cost of damages to the environment, while cross-country inequalities only cause a small increase. Overall, our findings show that the interactions of inequalities and ecosystem services can be quantitatively important for the assessment of conservation, climate, or redistributive policies.

Distance-based road pricing can internalize driving externalities and provide fiscally sustainable infrastructure financing as vehicle electrification erodes fuel tax revenues. Yet, political resistance may pose a barrier to implementation. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of preferences for universal road pricing using a stated choice experiment with nearly 4,000 Norwegian respondents. Policy alternatives vary systematically across urban peak prices, off-peak prices, nonurban prices, electric vehicle prices, and revenue allocation. We document robust majority support (70% to 80%) for most universal road pricing schemes, substantially exceeding typical support for local congestion charges. Support varies by design: public transport earmarking outperforms general budget allocation by 8 percentage points, while moderate pricing dominates high pricing by 5 to 7 points. Support varies substantially with car use, availability of transport alternatives, and institutional trust, but shows little sensitivity to income, urban residence, or toll exposure. Latent class analysis identifies unconditional supporters (57%), systematic opponents (22%), and a persuadable middle (21%). Randomized information treatments generate modest effects, with factual information increasing support by 6 percentage points. Political barriers to road pricing may be lower than assumed with moderate pricing and credible infrastructure earmarking.

Interactions of human economic development with the climate system and ecosystems in the biosphere caused the twin crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss. In this paper, we contribute to addressing the challenge of quantifying socially optimal climate and conservation policy in a world with atmosphere-biosphere interactions by combining the work of two influential economists: Partha Dasgupta and Bill Nordhaus. Specifically, we include nonlinear ecosystem capital dynamics inspired by the Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity in an updated DICE model to study the effects on the optimal level of ecosystem capital, economic growth, the social cost of carbon, and the social cost of renewable resource extraction. Our results, which are robust to changes in key parameter specifications, indicate the need for more ambitious climate policy to limit damages to ecosystem capital. We also highlight the role of reducing renewable resource extraction and waste creation to let ecosystems regenerate and foster the creation of co-benefits for climate mitigation through Nature-based carbon dioxide removal.

The global deployment of solar geoengineering raises critical questions about governance, regional disparities, and the socio-economic impacts of its side effects. This study focuses on the regional heterogeneity of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) impacts under different cooperation regimes, which is often overlooked in current climate-economic modeling frameworks. We propose a novel modeling approach that integrates an Earth system model emulator with a country-level integrated assessment model, enabling a detailed exploration of both the physical and welfare impacts of SAI deployment under different governance regimes. Our model captures the spatial variability of cooling effects and precipitation patterns, which are highly sensitive to the latitude of injection, and heterogeneity of economic impacts from temperature and precipitation variations.