Aaron D. Roth

My research agenda aims toward an international, intergenerational climate mitigation mechanism. Beyond efficiency, I consider mechanisms that respect both an implementation feasibility constraint and one of justice.

My conception of feasibility is self-enforcement. Individuals, firms, countries, and generations act according to their private incentives rather than being asked to make sacrifices on the basis of morality. My conception of justice requires that any mechanism respect how the wealth that the people of the world’s developed nations enjoy was built on the burning of fossil fuels while climate change’s damages will likely be disproportionately suffered by the people of less developed nations. Is such a mechanism possible? I will keep you posted. If not, expect an impossibility theorem.

Towards this end, I explore topics in mechanism design for pollution markets and environmental services, Pareto-improving policy, intergenerational welfare, uncertainty in integrated assessment modeling, distributional consequences of climate policy, and climate justice. I favor methods across political economy, structural estimation, and macroeconomics.