How was the birth of "Environmental Economics" related to the first Earth Day fifty years ago (April 22, 1970)? This short note introduces some ideas about an amazing burst of intellectual activity from 1968 to 1974. Environmental economics was not a field of economics before this brief period,...

We analyse two mechanism designs for refunding emission payments to polluting firms: output-based refunding (OBR) and expenditure-based refunding (EBR). In both instruments, emission fees are returned to the polluting industry, typically making the policy more politically acceptable than a...

Public economics has a well-developed literature on tax incidence – the ultimate burdens from tax policy. This literature is used here to describe not only the distributional effects of environmental taxes or subsidies but also the likely incidence of non-tax regulations, energy efficiency...