Essays in infrastructure and environmental policies

In the first chapter, "Does the Stage of Development Matter for Infrastructure Payoffs?”, I consider infrastructure as a channel for economic development. I address the question of whether the impact of infrastructure varies according to the stage of development of a country. I answer this question through an innovative methodology exploiting the information included in papers that provide estimates of infrastructure payoffs. I use a logit model whose dependent variable indicates whether these estimates are positively significant. To account for the variation of this dependent variable, I consider the sample characteristics of estimates. One of these characteristics is the stage of development of the countries included in the samples. Specifically, I use the weight of each of four income categories in the sample as an explanatory variable. The second chapter, "Climate Change Mitigation in the Presence of Technology Spillovers", explores the implications of an increase in clean technology spillovers between developed and developing countries. I build a 2-stage 2-country game of abatements in which players are linked with technology spillovers. The two countries are asymmetric in their technology endowment. Country 1 - the developed country - is the only one able to invest in technology that lowers abatement costs. Country 2 - the developing country - captures only part of the technology provided by country 1. The third chapter, "Threshold Effects in Self-Enforcing International Environmental Agreements" is co-written with Renaud Foucart. In this chapter, we address the stability of self-enforcing International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) with the presence of a threshold of irreversible climate change. Climate scientists recognize the existence of human-induced abrupt climate changes that are likely to occur when the climate system crosses some threshold. We show that taking into account these threshold effects - when identified with enough accuracy - allows for the existence of more ambitious agreements than those predicted by the traditional literature on IEAs. When considering abrupt irreversible damage, the contribution of any country that helps prevent the world from such a catastrophe is very large. Consequently, a high number of signatories that could potentially prevent the climate system from crossing the threshold could form a self-enforcing agreement.