Present Bias in Politics and Self-Committing Treaties

Bard Harstad and Anke Kessler

No 32780, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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
Note: EEE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32780.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Present Bias in Politics and Self-Committing Treaties (2025)
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:nbr:nberwo:32780

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32780
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().