About
- Professor of Economics
- Research Fellow of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
- Member of the Board of Editors, American Economic Review
- Co-Editor, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization
Voting History
Question A: US regulation of greenhouse gases – including carbon dioxide from motor vehicles and power plants, and methane from oil and gas wells – rests on the Clean Air Act. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced its rescission of the greenhouse gas endangerment finding and motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards: https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/final-rule-rescission-greenhouse-gas-endangerment. The President of the National Academy of Sciences subsequently wrote to the organization's members, noting that 'the EPA justified its decision on legal, economic, and regulatory opinions, and not on the science’.
The weight of economic analysis and evidence supports the conclusion that some form of regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is warranted.
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Comment: There is a lot of empirical evidence in the existing literature documenting a large impact of the Clean Air Act on several important outcomes. I am just providing a very few examples (much more are provided e.g. in the literature review by Aldy et al 2022).
-see background information here -see background information here |
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Question B: For US consumers and firms, the health and environmental benefits of greenhouse gas emission standards outweigh the costs, making the EPA rescission substantially net negative for American society.
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Comment: I do agree with this statement even if I think that it is not well framed. It is indeed hard to think about relevant metrics that would allow to compare the health and environmental benefits (e.g. in terms of life; I don’t think it makes sense to give a monetary price to life).
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Question C: Since the environmental costs of greenhouse gas emissions are globally distributed, some form of collective international regulation is warranted.
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Question A: Without a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC), Europe risks a further loss of control over its monetary system to foreign payment service providers, including US Big Tech platforms and US stablecoin issuers.
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Question B: Without a credible, modern wholesale settlement solution in central bank money - whether via a wholesale CBDC or equivalent infrastructure - Europe risks a further erosion of payments autonomy.
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Question A: The US intervention in Venezuela will have no measurable impact on the world oil price over the next 12 months.
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Question B: The US intervention will lead to a substantial increase in the profitability of US energy companies over the next five years.
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Question C: The US intervention will lead to a substantial increase in economic growth in Venezuela over the next five years.
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Question A: The potential for consumer privacy to be compromised by digital platforms’ use of personal data is sufficient to justify regulations that assign consumers some kind of default control rights over their data.
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Comment: As of today, and despite existing regulations such that the GDPR, consumer privacy is no longer protected online. This comes at a number of costs, both from the point of view of the consumers, but also from the one of the “citizens” (e.g. through targeted political advertising).
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Question B: To date, EU efforts to regulate use of personal data - primarily the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR - have been largely ineffective at protecting consumers.
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Comment: EU efforts to regulate the use of personal data are essential and go in the right direction. But unfortunately they have been mostly ineffective. E.g. while the GDPR has acted as an effective regulation for small players, it de facto benefited large social media and platforms.
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Question C: To date, EU efforts to regulate use of personal data - primarily GDPR - have imposed substantial costs on European businesses, slowing innovation and growth.
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Comment: There is no evidence of negative costs of these regulations on the innovation or growth of European businesses. But there is evidence of the consequences of the lack of such regulations on European citizens.
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Question A: Adoption of artificial intelligence will lead to a substantial increase in the growth rates of real per capita income in the US and Western Europe over the next ten years.
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Question B: Adoption of artificial intelligence will lead to a substantial increase in the unemployment rates in the US and Western Europe over the next ten years.
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Question A: For reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, subsidies for R&D on low-carbon technologies are justified in addition to carbon pricing mechanisms like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems.
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Comment: First, I am not fully convinced by the fact that carbon pricing mechanisms are efficient at reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. The evidence in the literature is still mixed.
Second, I think that selecting "good" low carbon technologies remains challenging.
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Question B: Higher subsidies for R&D on low-carbon technologies are justified by the fact that their successful deployment would not only reduce emissions in OECD countries but also reduce developing countries' emissions by encouraging them to substitute away from fossil fuels.
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Comment: If one is able to pick successfully the low-carbon technologies of the future, for sure we need them to be implemented both in rich and developing countries, and subsidies can help at doing so.
But an alternative approach would be to reduce emissions by reducing the use of energy
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