Environmental Macroeconomics: Environmental Policy, Business Cycles, and Directed Technical Change

Abstract

Environmental economics has traditionally fallen in the domain of microeconomics, but approaches from macroeconomics have recently been applied to studying environmental policy. We focus on two macroeconomic tools and their application to environmental economics. First, real-business-cycle models can incorporate pollution and pollution policy and can be used to answer several questions. For example, how should environmental policy adjust to business cycles? How do different types of policies fare in a context with business cycles? Second, endogenous technological growth is an important component of environmental policy. Several studies ask how policy can be designed both to tackle emissions directly and to influence the adoption of clean technologies. We focus on these two aspects of environmental macroeconomics but emphasize that there are many other potential applications.