Climate change is considered to be one of the most significant and complex challenges facing the world in the twenty-first century. As such, it is essential to increase the knowledge base regarding climate change and how best to address its impacts through efficient policies. This special issue, which is divided into two parts – published in the previous and current issues of Environment and Development Economics – is a selection of papers related to ‘The Economics of Climate Change and Sustainability’, the topic of an international workshop organized by the Economics Department of the University of Bologna in April 2018. The papers in this special issue cover a wide range of climate-change-related topics, including endogenous growth and overlapping generation models; climate-related financing and green bonds; demography; location decisions and technology diffusion; quantitative relationships and experimental approaches. They aim at providing new insights into the economics of climate change and help to identify new directions for future research.

Climate change is one of the most significant and complex challenges facing the world's economies. The necessity to enlarge the knowledge base regarding climate change and its impacts and to design efficient policies is widely accepted by the scientific community, the decision makers and the general public. This special issue, which will be published in two parts in the current and subsequent issue of Environment and Development Economics, is a selection of papers related to the topic of the international workshop on ‘The Economics of Climate Change and Sustainability’ organized by the Economics Department of the University of Bologna in April 2018. The papers in this special issue cover a wide range of climate-change-related topics, which include endogenous growth and overlapping generation models; climate-related financing and green bonds; demographics; location decisions; technology diffusion; quantitative relationships and experimental approaches. We hope that this special issue will provide some new insights into the economics of climate change and help to identify new directions for future research.

Starting from the Medieval period, women in the Italian Alps experienced a progressive erosion in property rights over the commons. We collected documents about the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land issued by hundreds of villages over a period of six centuries (thirteenth-nineteenth). Based on this original dataset, we provide a long-term perspective of decentralized institutional change in which gender-biased inheritance systems emerged as a defensive measure to preserve the wealth of village insiders. This institutional change also had implications for the population growth, marriage strategies, and the protection from economic shocks.

The claims about (1) the lack of empirical support for a model of strong reciprocation and (2) the irrelevant empirical role of costly punishment to support cooperation in the field need qualifications. The interpretation of field evidence is not straightforward, and other-regarding preferences are also likely to play a role in the field.

This article examines changes in institutions that protected property rights in the Alps between the thirteenth and the nineteenth century and, in particular, alternative management systems adopted for the common pastures and forests in about 200 communities. Over time, private-order institutions in the form of charters replaced informal arrangements sustained by the long-run interaction among villagers. Although costly to run, the charters accomplished several tasks that increased resource use efficiency.