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,...

While prior literature has identified various effects of environmental policy, this note uses the example of a proposed carbon permit system to illustrate and discuss six different types of distributional effects: (1) higher prices of carbon-intensive products, (2) changes in relative returns to...

Research about the circular economy is dominated by engineers, architects, and social scientists in fields other than economics. The concepts they study can be useful in economic models of policies – to reduce virgin materials extraction, to encourage green design, and to make better use of...

Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a Social Security program that reduces overall inequality by...

Circular Economy literature recommends longer lasting products, in order to reduce pollution from extraction, production, and disposal. Our economic analysis finds conditions where consumers choose lives that are too short - a "durability gap". Then policies targeting durability raise welfare....

Because electricity is a higher fraction of spending for those with low income, carbon taxes are believed to be regressive. Many argue, however, that their revenues can be used to offset the regressivity. We assess these claims by employing data on 322,000 families in the U.S. Treasury's...

To clarify and interpret the workings of a large computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of environmental policy in the U.S., we build an aggregated Cobb-Douglas (CD) model that can be solved easily and analytically. Its closed-form expressions show exactly how key parameters determine the...

Improvements in energy efficiency can reduce costs of consuming services from cars and appliances and result in positive rebound that offsets part of the direct energy reduction. Our analytical general equilibrium model decomposes rebound into direct and indirect effects. A costless technology...

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...

To help first- or second-year graduate students in economics apply their theoretical training, this paper shows how to solve a simple and intuitive computable general equilibrium (CGE) model using a calculator. Because this simplified Harberger model uses Cobb Douglas functional forms for...