This article, "Climate Change Abatement: Not "Stern" Enough?", by Thomas Sterner and Dallas Burtraw, is forthcoming in a book, Parry and Day, eds. "100 Policy Commentaries on Environmental, Energy, Urban and Public Health Problems: Volume 1", RFF Press.

The Stern Review (2006) has come to symbolize something of a dividing line in the evolution of the common appreciation of the climate problem. It is fair to say that during the last decade there has been a gradual but uneven increase in the perceived gravity of anthropogenic climate change, both among scientists and, with some time lag, the general public.

This paper analyzes differences in firms’ responsiveness to PROPER, Indonesia’s public disclosure program for industrial pollution control. The overall effectiveness of this program at achieving emissions reductions and its low regulatory costs have earned it a good reputation around the world. PROPER had no deterrents or incentives other than those that arose indirectly from publicly disclosing information about the environmental performances of firms.

The authors used a framed field experiment with coffee farmers in Costa Rica after tropical storm Alma to explore how farmers react to different levels of risk to income and productive means from extreme weather under measurable and unmeasurable uncertainty. They also examined whether investment costs to reduce vulnerability exhibit economies of scope.

There is growing interest in understanding whether behavior is the same across locations. By holding cross- and within-country dimensions constant (in contrast to previous studies on cross-group comparisons of conditional cooperation), the authors investigated cooperative behavior between social groups in the same location. Their results reveal significantly different cooperation behavior, suggesting that different social groups exhibit differences both in terms of composition of types and extent of conditional cooperation.

Trust is measured using both survey questions and a trust experiment among a random sample of Muslim and Hindu household heads in rural Bangladesh.

The calibration theorem by Rabin (2000) implies that seemingly plausible smallstake choices under risk imply implausible large-stake risk aversion. This theorem is derived based on the expected utility of wealth model. However, Cox and Sadiraj (2006) show that such implications do not follow from the expected utility of income model. One may then wonder about the implications for more applied consumption analysis.

This paper concerns optimal income taxation under asymmetric information in a two-type overlapping generations model, where people care about their relative consumption compared to others.

Using a choice experiment approach, the authors investigated what governs Ethiopian farmers’ in-situ conservation decisions and crop-variety preferences.