Endogenous Growth with a Ceiling on the Stock of Pollution

The effects of an agreement such as the Kyoto Protocol, which implicitly imposes a ceiling on the stock of pollution, have recently been studied in Hotelling models. We add pollution and a ceiling to the endogenous growth model of \cite{tsur2005scarcity} to study the effects of the ceiling on capital accumulation and research investments. The ceiling increases the scarcity of the exhaustible resource in the short run, which boosts backstop utilization. This implies that R\&D becomes more beneficial compared with capital accumulation. How the short run development path of an economy is affected depends on its capital endowment or richness, respectively. Only economies which are neither too rich nor too poor may invest more into research. In the long run an economy with a ceiling follows basically the same long run development path as an economy without the ceiling.