On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change. Weitzman, M. L Review of Economics and Statistics, 91(1):1–19, February, 2009. ![On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change [link]](https://bibbase.org/img/filetypes/link.svg "link")
Paper doi abstract bibtex With climate change as prototype example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low-probability, high-impact catastrophes. Even when updated by Bayesian learning, uncertain structural parameters induce a critical “tail fattening” of posterior-predictive distributions. Such fattened tails have strong implications for situations, like climate change, where a catastrophe is theoretically possible because prior knowledge cannot place sufficiently narrow bounds on overall damages. This paper shows that the economic consequences of fat-tailed structural uncertainty (along with unsureness about high-temperature damages) can readily outweigh the effects of discounting in climate-change policy analysis.
@article{weitzman_modeling_2009,
title = {On {Modeling} and {Interpreting} the {Economics} of {Catastrophic} {Climate} {Change}},
volume = {91},
issn = {0034-6535, 1530-9142},
url = {http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/10.1162/rest.91.1.1},
doi = {10.1162/rest.91.1.1},
abstract = {With climate change as prototype example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low-probability, high-impact catastrophes. Even when updated by Bayesian learning, uncertain structural parameters induce a critical “tail fattening” of posterior-predictive distributions. Such fattened tails have strong implications for situations, like climate change, where a catastrophe is theoretically possible because prior knowledge cannot place sufficiently narrow bounds on overall damages. This paper shows that the economic consequences of fat-tailed structural uncertainty (along with unsureness about high-temperature damages) can readily outweigh the effects of discounting in climate-change policy analysis.},
language = {en},
number = {1},
urldate = {2017-05-15},
journal = {Review of Economics and Statistics},
author = {Weitzman, Martin L},
month = feb,
year = {2009},
keywords = {GA, Untagged},
pages = {1--19},
}
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