China’s pledge in September to pursue carbon neutrality by 2060 was followed by a similar pledge from Japan a month later.
Designed by Columbia Business School, the New Initiative Will Accelerate the Teaching of Climate Change in Business Schools Globally
Columbia Business School Professor Bruce Usher discusses his new book, which outlines the risks and opportunities for investors from climate change, and how current students and alumni are addressing major environmental challenges.
Columbia Business School Professor Abby Joseph Cohen recently joined former Dean Glenn Hubbard to discuss the forces that could shape the economy and markets in the year ahead.
This paper aims to unpack the pro-social motivations of green innovators. In a field experiment inviting SBIR grantees to learn more about and apply to MIT Solve, we provide scientifically valid scenarios varying the time-frame and scale of human cost of climate change. Innovators' response in clicks and applications increases with both scale and immediacy treatments. Our structural model estimates a welfare discount rate of 0.76%, providing a measure of innovators' value of future generations, and an elasticity to lives lost of 0.23, implying diminishing marginal concern to human loss.
Pricing greenhouse gas emissions involves making trade-offs between consumption today and unknown damages in the (distant) future. This setup calls for an optimal control model to determine the carbon dioxide (CO2) price. It also relies on society's willingness to substitute consumption across time and across uncertain states of nature, the forte of Epstein-Zin preference specifications.
We investigate whether progress towards an international treaty on greenhouse gas emissions could benefit from insights about tipping a non-cooperative game from an inefficient to an efficient equilibrium. Games with increasing differences have multiple equilibria and have a “tipping set,” a subset of agents who by changing from the inefficient to the efficient equilibrium can induce all others to do the same. We argue that international climate negotiations form such a game and so have a tipping set. This can provide a novel perspective on finding a way forward in climate negotiations.
A novel economic model for reducing deforestation is being proposed by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations at the current United Nations climate change conference in Montreal. A new player in the climate change game, the coalition is proposing economic incentives for conserving tropical forests while contributing to climate stability. The coalition's proposal seeks to create new markets while reforming outmoded market and regulatory mechanisms. From the perspective of tropical countries, this change would make conservation a financially viable policy, with real economic returns.