In recent years there has been great interest in the possibility of substituting environmentally motivated or 'green' taxes for ordinary income taxes. Some have suggested that such revenue-neutral reforms might offer a 'double dividend:' not only (1) improve the environment but also (2) reduce...

A tax on vehicle emissions can efficiently induce all of the cheapest forms of abatement. Consumers could drive less, buy a smaller car with better gas mileage, use cleaner gasoline, and repair pollution control equipment (PCE). However, the technology is not yet available to measure and tax...

I use data from the 1994 Consumer Expenditure Survey as well as other sources to measure the distributional impact of green tax reforms and consumption tax reforms using both annual income and lifetime income approaches to rank households. A modest tax reform in which environmental taxes equal...

A unilateral carbon tax trades off the distortionary costs of taxation and the future gains from slowing down global warming. Because the cost is local and immediate, whereas the benefit is global and delayed, this tradeoff tends to be unfavorable to unilateral carbon taxes. We show that this...

This paper characterizes an optimal redistribution program when taxation authorities: (1)" are uninformed about individuals' value of time in both market and non-market activities observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment, and (3) are utilitarian. " Formally, the problem...

Just like any trade activity in well-functioning markets, migration tends to enhance the efficiency of the allocation of resources. With non-distortionary income distribution policy instruments which can compensate losers, migration generates income gains. But the gains tend to be typically...

This paper assesses the impacts across US household income groups of carbon taxes of various designs. We consider both the source-side impacts (reflecting how policies affect nominal wage, capital, and transfer incomes) and the use-side impacts (reflecting how policies alter prices of goods and...

We analyze the quantitative labor market and aggregate effects of a carbon tax in a framework with pollution externalities and equilibrium unemployment. Our model incorporates endogenous labor force participation and two margins of adjustment influenced by carbon taxes: (1) firm creation and (2)...

Despite technological advances, an individual car's emissions still cannot be measured reliably enough to impose a Pigovian tax. This paper explores alternative market incentives that could be used instead. We solve for second-best combinations of uniform taxes on gasoline, engine size, and...