Can Economic Policy Mitigate Climate-Change ?
How sharply should countries reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions? What should be the time profile of emissions reductions? How should the reductions be distributed across industries and countries? Or should emissions reductions be primarily induced through taxes on greenhouse gases? Should one subsidize green industries? What should be the relative contributions of rich and poor households or nations?
To address such kind of questions in a quantitative fashion, one needs to develop large-scale, multi-region dynamic stochastic economic models (potentially with overlapping generations) that incorporate state-of-the-art climate physics and develop high-performance computing codes that are capable of solving such models on a human time scale.
Along those lines, I will showcase my ongoing interdisciplinary research efforts from three working papers with various co-authors that try to
a) to reconcile the climate part of the DICE2016 model with the benchmark models in climate science
b) perform uncertainty quantification in IAM models, and
c) show in an 18-region overlapping generations model who are the winners and losers of climate change.