Present Bias in Politics and Self-Committing Treaties

Bard Harstad and Anke Kessler

Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Abstract: We study how international agreements can take advantage of domestic time-inconsistency problems in the context of environmental policies. For example, policymakers will prefer future policies to be sustainable, but find it tempting to raise consumption when being in office. We find the equilibrium number of signatory countries to be higher than when preferences are time consistent, especially when the political environment is unstable and polarized, and the international spillovers are limited. In contrast to the traditional literature, the model can also explain why countries sign conventions with mandates that do not vary with the coalition size.

JEL-codes: F53 H87 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/work ... -committing-treaties

Related works:
Working Paper: Present Bias in Politics and Self-Committing Treaties (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:stabus:4210

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().