*Social insurance programs and environmental policies imply intergenerational transfers. The former affect the disposable income of the older population at the expense of the consumption of younger generations, while the latter affect a long series of future generations by constraining the actions of current cohorts. In this project, I want to study the dynamics of such institutions in a political economy framework when agents can have moral concerns (à la Kant). We discuss two main models. A two-period benchmark model with heterogeneous agents, to understand the intertemporal choices of individuals with different environmental preferences, and an OLG model to understand the long-run dynamics of retirement, savings, and climate. 

**Subject to popular flee, internal rebellions and diseases, states have historically developed only under very particular agro-ecological circumstances. This paper advances and empirically validates a new perspective on state formation, helping to understand their paucity and uneven development across the globe throughout the pre-industrial era. I posit that the dissimilarity of the agricultural calendar was one of the fundamental constraints for the emergence and persistence of centralised governments. Using data from the Ethnographic Atlas, I provide evidence that the heterogeneity of agricultural growing seasons was a crucial barrier to state centralisation. This holds true when controlling for a wide range of alternative determinants of state-building. The use of potential, rather than observed, agro-ecological data, as well as various robustness tests, give credit to an interpretation of the results beyond the mere correlation.