Abstract

The research is concerned with two main issues, namely the assessment of global warming and of its economic and financial implications.

Concerning the first issue, the project aims at the econometric evaluation of the evidence on climate change, in relation to its physical measure, i.e. the existence of a warming trend in temperatures, driven by radiative forcing (of human-made and natural origin), as well as the existence of feedback effects of global warming for the natural environments (ENSO cycle, hurricanes activity).

Concerning the second issue, the project aims at the econometric evaluation of the economic and financial implications of climate change. Two main topics pertain to this second part of the project. The first topic is related to the pricing of climate change risk and the analysis foresees applications to the catastrophe bonds market and to stocks and traditional bonds for European firms. The financial stability implications of climate change, as arising from a progressive vs. an abrupt transition to a low-carbon environment, are also of high interest for this part of the project.

On the other hand, the second topic is related to the implications of climate change for long-run economic growth. In this respect, the aim of the research is to assess the interaction between economic development and carbon dioxide emissions for European and other industrialized countries over a time span of more than a century. The focus of the research is not only on the assessment of the casual linkage between economic activity and greenhouse gases emissions, but also on the feedback effects of the transition to a low carbon economy on economic conditions, i.e. the changing sectorial structure of the economy and the pricing of energy resources.