Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Urban Economics

NBER Working Paper No. 20716

Issued in November 2014

NBER Program(s):Environment and Energy Economics, Public Economics



In an urbanizing world economy featuring thousands of cities, households and firms have strong incentives to make locational investments and self protection choices to reduce their exposure to new climate change induced risks. This pursuit of self interest reduces the costs imposed by climate change. This paper develops a dynamic compensating differentials model to explore how the “menu” offered by a system of cities insures us against emerging risks. Insights from urban economics offer a series of testable hypotheses concerning the economic incidence of spatially tied climate change risk.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20716

Published: Kahn, Matthew E., 2015. "Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Urban Economics," Strategic Behavior and the Environment, now publishers, vol. 5(1), pages 1-30, June. citation courtesy of

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