International environmental agreements without commitment

Larry Karp and Hiroaki Sakamoto

No 508, 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We analyze a dynamic model of international agreements where countries cannot make long-term commitments and have no sanctions or rewards to induce participation. Countries can communicate with each other to build endogenous beliefs about the random consequences of (re)opening nego- tiation. Provided that countries are patient, many different agreements might emerge, including an effective agreement with many participants. Along the way, however, negotiation might yield a succession of short-lived agreements with a small number of participants. Beliefs are important, and negotiations matter. Our theoretical results are consistent with the existing empirical observations and they explain the `paradox of interna- tional agreements'.

Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-env and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2018/paper_508.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:red:sed018:508

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().