Frederick (Rick) van der Ploeg

• PhD, Cambridge, UK
• Managing Director at University of Oxford

This paper explores a novel mechanism through which transitions to a low-carbon economy can proceed smoothly without excessive disinvestment in carbon-intensive capital. The mechanism is analyzed in a Lucas-Uzawa green growth model with carbon-temperature dynamics. Due to the externalities associated with climate damages and learning by doing, insu...

Asset pricing and climate policy are analyzed in a global economy where consumption goods are produced by both a green and a carbon‐intensive sector. Given that the economy is initially heavily dependent on carbon‐intensive capital, the desire to diversify assets complements the attempt to mitigate economic damages from climate change. In the longe...

Ngo Van Long’s classic paper on the risk of expropriation of natural resources published in a 1975 issue of the Journal of Economic Theory was an instant classic, which spawned a huge literature. Here I pay tribute to this wonderful brilliant yet modest scholar by briefly reviewing his contribution and then sketching how his insights can be used to...

Here I review the fiscal costs of carbon pricing and climate policies, paying due attention to second-best as well as first-best polies. This starts with a discussion of when the double dividend hypothesis, i.e. when recycling carbon taxes via lower income taxes boosts employment and lowers the marginal cost of public funds. I propose that recyclin...

We surveyed economists' attitudes toward adjusting discount rates to the risk profile of public programs. Three-quarters of respondents recommend to use project-specific discount rates. For example, on average, respondents discount railway infrastructures more than hospitals and climate mitigation. But the degree of discount discrimination between...

We analyse the optimal paths of abatement and carbon prices under a variety of economic, temperature and damage risks. Carbon prices grow in line with economic growth, but with convex damages and temperature-dependent risks of climatic tipping points grow more quickly and with gradual resolution of uncertainty grow more slowly. With temperature-dep...

A disorderly transition to a low-carbon economy may pose significant costs for both financial and nonfinancial firms through the stranding of physical assets, firms’ defaults, and volatility in asset prices. The spread of these disruptions through production and financial networks may exacerbate transition costs. Green financial and monetary polici...

Policymakers in the Netherlands face various potential pitfalls and obstacles as they try to realize their commitments regarding cutting down CO 2 emissions, as agreed at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in Paris. Initial policy proposals suggest that there is a danger that the required emissions reductions will be, at bes...

The Dutch tax system distorts economic decisions, treats equal economic positions unequally, and is extraordinarily complex. Following in the footsteps of the Mirrlees Review, prominent economists from academia and the policy arena, at home and abroad, provide evidence-based independent analyses of the system’s shortcomings, as well as detailed pol...

Green tax reform is unpopular because, typically, the poor are hurt most by the higher prices of carbon-intensive commodities. If revenues from a carbon tax are recycled, it may be feasible to gain popular support for green tax reform. To investigate this, we estimate an EASI demand system from German household data and a labour supply schedule, us...

A four-pronged approach to climate policy is presented consisting of carbon pricing, subsidies for renewable energies, transformative green investments and climate finance and engendering flywheel effects. Then, a variety of societal and political challenges and obstacles faced by such a climate policy and what can be done to overcome them are disc...

Economists have adopted the Pigouvian approach to climate policy, which sets the carbon price to the social cost of carbon. We adjust this carbon price for macroeconomic uncertainty and disasters by deriving the risk-adjusted discount rate. We highlight ethics- versus market-based calibrations and discuss the effects of a falling term structure of...

The social cost of carbon is the expected present value of damages from emitting one ton of carbon today. We use perturbation theory to derive an approximate tractable expression for this cost adjusted for climatic and economic risk. We allow for different aversion to risk and intertemporal fluctuations, skewness and dynamics in the risk distributi...

The general equilibrium model developed by Golosov et al. (2014), GHKT for short, is modified to allow for additional negative impacts of global warming on utility and productivity growth, mean reversion in the ratio of climate damages to production, labour-augmenting technical progress, and population growth. We also replace the GHKT assumption of...

The macro-financial transition risks that result from disorderly transitions to a carbon-free or low-carbon economy may entail significant costs due to the risk of stranded assets, defaults, collapse in stock market value, both for financial firms and non-financial firms. The effects of networks, contagion, and higher-round effects of stranding may...

Can oil discovery shocks affect the demand for protectionism? An intertemporal model of Dutch disease indicates that if the tradable sector is politically dominant then an oil discovery can induce protectionism. If the economy is also credit constrained, this effect is intensified upon discovery, but partially reversed when oil revenues start to fl...

Assets in the fossil fuel industries are at risk of losing market value due to unanticipated breakthroughs in renewable technology and governments stepping up climate policies in light of the Paris commitments to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2°C. Stranded assets arise due to uncertainty about the future timing of these two types of events and sub...

A cap on global warming implies a tighter carbon budget which can be enforced with a credible second-best renewable energy subsidy designed to lock up fossil fuel and curb cumulative emissions. Such a subsidy brings forward the end of the fossil fuel era but accelerates fossil fuel extraction and global warming in the short run. A weaker fossil fue...

We show that economic models of climate change produce climate dynamics inconsistent with current climate science models: (i) the delay between CO2 emissions and warming is much too long and (ii) positive carbon cycle feedbacks are mostly absent. These inconsistencies lead to biased economic policy advice. Controlling for how the economy is represe...

If global warming is to stay below 2 °C, there are four risks of assets stranding. First, substantial fossil fuel reserves will be stranded at the end of the fossil era. Second, this is true for exploration capital too. Third, unanticipated changes in present or expected climate policy cause discrete jumps in today's valuation of physical and natur...

Global warming can be curbed by pricing carbon emissions and thus substituting fossil fuel with renewable energy consumption. Breakthrough technologies (e.g., fusion energy) can reduce the cost of such policies. However, the chance of such a technology coming to market depends on investment. We model breakthroughs as an irreversible tipping point i...

This paper analyses optimal corrective taxation and optimal income redistribution. The Pigouvian pollution tax is higher if pollution damages disproportionally hurt the poor due to equity weighting of pollution damages. Moreover, under general utility functions, optimal pollution taxes should be set below the Pigouvian tax if the poor spend a dispr...

The optimal reaction to a potential productivity shock as a consequence of climate tipping is to substantially tax carbon in order to curb the risk of tipping, but to adjust capital as well in order to smooth consumption when tipping occurs. We also allow for conventional marginal climate damages and decompose the optimal carbon tax in two catastro...

A simple integrated assessment framework that gives rules for the optimal carbon price, transition to the carbon-free era and stranded carbon assets is presented, which highlights the ethical, economic, geophysical and political drivers of optimal climate policy. For the ethics we discuss the role of intergenerational inequality aversion and the di...

This paper explores the effect of market orientation on (known or available) natural resource wealth using a novel dataset of world-wide major hydrocarbon and mineral discoveries. Our empirical estimates based on a large panel of countries show that increased market orientation causes a significant increase in discoveries of natural resources. In a...

With the election of President Trump, climate deniers feel emboldened and moved from the fringes to the centre of global policy making. We study how an agnostic approach to policy, based on Pascal's wager and allowing for subjective prior probability beliefs about whether climate deniers are right, prices carbon. Using the DICE integrated assessmen...

This book is about the challenges and opportunities facing developing countries in using their extractive industries (oil and gas and mining) to achieve inclusive and sustainable development. While resource wealth can yield prosperity, it can also cause acute social inequality, deep poverty, environmental damage, and political instability. There is...

This book is about the challenges and opportunities facing developing countries in using their extractive industries (oil and gas and mining) to achieve inclusive and sustainable development. While resource wealth can yield prosperity, it can also cause acute social inequality, deep poverty, environmental damage, and political instability. There is...

If the Paris Agreement targets are to be met, there may be very few years left for policy makers to start cutting emissions. Here we calculate by what year, at the latest, one has to take action to keep global warming below the 2 K target (relative to pre-industrial levels) at the year 2100 with a 67 % probability; we call this the point of no retu...

If the Paris targets are to be met, there may be very few years left for policy makers to start cutting emissions. Here, we ask by what year at the latest one has to take action to keep global warming below the 2 K target (relative to preindustrial levels) at the year 2100 with a 67 % probability; we call this the Point of No Return (PNR). Using a...

A simple rule for the optimal global price of carbon is presented, which captures the geophysical, economic, and ethical drivers of climate policy as well as the effect of uncertainty about future growth of consumption. There is also a discussion of the optimal carbon budget and the amount of unburnable carbon and stranded fossil fuel reserves and...

Cumulative emissions drive peak global warming and determine the carbon budget needed to keep temperature below 2 or 1.5 °C. This safe carbon budget is low if uncertainty about the transient climate response is high and risk tolerance (willingness to accept risk of overshooting the temperature target) is low. Together with energy costs, this budget...

Temperature responses and optimal climate policies depend crucially on the choice of a particular climate model. To illustrate, the temperature responses to given emission reduction paths implied by the climate modules of the well-known integrated assessments models DICE, FUND and PAGE are described and compared. A dummy temperature module based on...

The optimal reaction to a climate tipping point that becomes more imminent with global warming is to be precautionary in adjusting capital to prepare for the calamity and to price carbon to make catastrophic change less imminent. The saving response can be positive or negative. If the mean lag for the impact of the catastrophe is long enough, the s...

The political economy of exhaustible resource extraction is analysed in three contexts. First, if an incumbent faces a threat of being removed once and for all by a rival faction, extraction becomes more voracious if the factions do not share rents equally. Second, perennial political conflict cycles are more inefficient if constitutional cohesiven...

The economics of climate change is an active field of research. The contributions to a Special Issue are put in context of the literature, and it is suggested that second-best issues such as carbon leakage and the Green Paradox need to be complemented with a political economy analysis of why certain instruments are politically infeasible and with i...

Policy prescriptions for managing natural resource windfalls are based on the permanent income hypothesis: none of the windfall is invested at home and saving in an intergenerational SWF is dictated by smoothing consumption across different generations. Furthermore, with Dutch disease effects the optimal response is to intertemporally smooth the re...

Despite substantial oil and gas revenue Russia's fiscal stance is unsustainable. Under our benchmark assumptions the permanent-income rule requires a permanent tightening of the fiscal stance by 4.6%-points of GDP. Delaying it by a decade implies that the fiscal stance needs to be tightened by a further 0.9%-point. This benchmark optimal policy ens...

Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence and the Rules that Run the World, Leif Wenar. Oxford University Press, 2016, lii + 494 pages. - Frederick van der Ploeg

Keeping climate change within limits requires that most of the available carbon-based energy sources need to be abandoned underground. We study how fast and how much this transition to carbon-free energy needs to occur within a welfare-maximizing Ramsey growth model of climate change. Our model also addresses the market failure in the development o...

Many countries have experienced windfalls though discoveries of oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, or other minerals. These can constitute 80–90 % of government or export revenues for many developing countries. Such foreign exchange windfalls offer a unique opportunity for resource-rich countries to improve the future of their citizens by speeding u...

Climate change must deal with two market failures: global warming and learning by doing in renewable energy production. The first-best policy consists of an aggressive renewables subsidy in the near term and a gradually rising and falling carbon tax. Given that global carbon taxes remain elusive, policy makers might have to rely on a second-best su...