Working Paper

The risk-adjusted carbon price

Ton S. van den Bremer, Rick van der Ploeg
CESifo, Munich, 2019

CESifo Working Paper No. 7592

We use perturbation methods to derive a rule for the optimal risk-adjusted social cost of carbon (SCC) that incorporates the effects of uncertainties associated with climate and the economy from a calibrated DSGE model. We allow for different aversions to risk and intertemporal fluctuations, convex damages, uncertainties in economic growth, atmospheric carbon, climate sensitivity and damages, their correlations, and distributions that are skewed in the longer run to capture long-run climate feedbacks. Our non-certainty-equivalent rule for the SCC incorporates precaution, risk insurance, and climate sensitivity and damage rate hedging effects to deal with future economic and climatic and damage risks.

CESifo Category
Energy and Climate Economics
Fiscal Policy, Macroeconomics and Growth
JEL Classification: H210, Q510, Q540