WORKING PAPERS.

Optimal Carbon Offsets with Heterogeneous Regions, with Manuel Macera @Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. (Paper). Submitted. We study optimal climate policy in a global economy where regions differ in wealth and vulnerability to climate change. Carbon emissions from production generate output losses - a negative climate externality - and a technology to absorb and offset these emissions is available to all regions. We investigate how inequality shapes the stance of the global climate policy and the schedule of net emissions across regions: emissions net of carbon offsets. We provide an aggregation result that shows that the model with regional heterogeneity can be cast into a representative region world economy with a different discount factor and damage function elasticity to net emissions. We use this result to show that (i) Requiring all regions to contribute equally to carbon offsets exacerbates inequality and, therefore, efficiency calls for a less aggressive climate policy with more emissions and less carbon offsetting than in a representative agent world; (ii) When carbon offsets are allowed to depend on wealth, a more aggressive climate policy is optimal; (iii) Any global net emissions target prescribes positive net emis- sions for poor regions and negative net emissions for wealthy ones, with the burden on the rich increasing with inequality. These results highlight that carbon offsets play a crucial role in designing global climate policy because they act as a redistribution tool across unequal regions.

Unequal Climate Policy in an Unequal World, with Daniel Carroll @Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and Sewon Hur @Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Preliminary Draft). We study the link between household inequality and carbon taxes. First, using detailed household expenditure and embodied emissions data, we document that low-income household expenditures have higher embodied emissions per dollar than that of high-income households, suggesting that a carbon tax may be regressive. Second, using a simple climate-economy model with unequal households, we show that when the planner has access to a full set of tax and transfer instruments, the optimal carbon tax follows the Pigouvian rule and is the same tax that would result from a representative agent framework. However, when the planner is not allowed to distribute resources across agents, the constrained optimal carbon tax is heterogeneous: higher income households are taxed at a higher rate because of their lower marginal utility. When the planner is further limited to uniform carbon taxes across agents, we show that the constrained optimal carbon tax deviates from the Pigouvian rule and is lower than the unconstrained optimal carbon tax. Finally, we embed the simple climate-economy into a standard incomplete markets model to quantify the effectiveness of these policies in reducing carbon emissions and their distributional consequences.

Needed: a Price for Carbon Capture. Submitted. This paper presents a macroeconomic framework for carbon markets. I set up a global climate-economy with carbon-intensive energy inputs, renewable energy, natural carbon sinks, and a carbon capture technology to show that (i) within a comprehensive carbon pricing system, a carbon tax alone implements any given path of carbon emissions; (ii) `additionality' is not a property of the optimal carbon pricing system; (iii) without a carbon tax, renewable subsidies, preservation of carbon sinks and a price for carbon capture are needed.

WORK IN PROGRESS.

Carbon Taxes and Inequality: A Sufficient Statistic Approach, with Sewon Hur @Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Argentina’s Climate Policy: Agriculture and Livestocks, with Daniel Perczyk @Fundación Torcuato Di Tella.

PUBLICATIONS.

Implicit Carbon Prices: Making do with the taxes we have, with Armon Rezai @WU Vienna. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2024, Volume 125, ISSN 0095-0696, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2024.102950.

Fossil fuel subsidies, the green paradox and the fiscal paradox. Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy, 2021, Volume 10, Number 1. DOI: 10.5547/2160-5890.10.1.mbel

No Brainers in Argentina's Climate Policy (Paper) (Book) In: No Brainers and Low-Hanging Fruit in National Climate Policy. CEPR PRESS. Chapter 1. Edited by Francesco Caselli, Alexander Ludwig and Rick van der Ploeg. October 2021. 

Carbon taxes and renewable energy: a discussion about the Green paradox (Paper), In: The Economics of Climate Change in Argentina. Peer-reviewed. Chapter 6. Edited by Belfiori M.E., and Rabassa M.J.. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. March 2021.

 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62252-7_6.

Climate change and intergenerational equity: Revisiting the uniform taxation principle on carbon energy inputs  (Paper). Energy Policy, Volume 121, October 2018, pages 292-299, ISSN 0301-4215, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.06.026.

Carbon Pricing, Carbon Sequestration, and Social Discounting (Paper) (Poster). European Economic Review, Volume 96, July 2017, Pages 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2017.03.015.  Awarded the 2016 CESifo Distinguished Research Affiliate Award in Energy and Climate Economics.

Time Consistent Climate Policies (Paper) In:  Political Economy And Instruments of Environmental Politics. The MIT Press.  Peer-reviewed. Chapter 12. Edited by Friedrich Schneider, Andrea Kollmann and Johannes Reichl. August 2015.  http://dx.doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029247.003.0012

PEER-REVIEWED BOOKS

Climate Change and Economic Growth: Insights from Argentina. Belfiori, Elisa and Gertner, Gastón. Editors. SpringerBriefs in Latin American Studies. Peer-reviewed. Springer, Cham. Accepted. (Expected Dec 2024). Book Outline and Contributors. New!

The Economics of Climate Change in Argentina. Belfiori, Elisa and Rabassa, Mariano J. Editors. March, 2021. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Peer-reviewed. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62252-7

POLICY REPORTS

Desarrollo Sostenible, Medio Ambiente e Infraestructura. Nota sectorial para el reporte IDEAL 2022: Energía, agua y salud para un mejor medio ambiente. (link) , CAF- Banco de Desarrollo de America Latina. 

Academic advisor for Reporte de Economía y Desarrollo (RED) 2023, Desafíos globales, soluciones regionales: América Latina y el Caribe frente a la crisis climática y de biodiversidadDesafíos globales, soluciones regionales. (link),  CAF- Banco de Desarrollo de America Latina. 

OPINION & MEDIA

Econ-on-Mics.

Transición 2030.  A24 

Pensar Distinto. TN - Todo Noticias. 

Las emisiones de carbono crecen desde 1900, el calentamiento global no se detiene. Diario Perfil

Cometas, mamuts y viaje a lo desconocido: un año bisagra para la economía del clima. LaNacion

Mamuts y gigacornios: cuenta regresiva en la economía del cambio climático. LaNacion

Pandemia en Tiempos de Cambio Climático. Institucional 30 años DiTella.

¿El subsidio a las renovables debe ser cero?: El Cronista