Financing productive public capital through distortionary taxes typically creates a trade-off: the optimal investment is determined as a compromise between efficiency-enhancing public investment and perturbing market efficiency, but is never socially optimal. In contrast, such a trade-off can...

Imperfect altruism between generations may lead to insufficient capital accumulation. We study the welfare consequences of taxing the rent on a fixed production factor, such as land, in this setting. We prove that taxing the rent is welfare-enhancing as it increases capital investment. This...

Carbon pricing regulates emission flows and collects rents from underlying fossil resource stocks. The resulting investment shift implies lower climate policy costs and improved welfare if capital is underaccumulated. We prove that under emission trading, such a beneficial macroeconomic...

We study the impact of heterogeneous saving behavior on the distributional effects of public investment. A capital tax is levied to finance productive public capital in an economy with two types of households: high income households who save dynastically and middle income households who save for...

We study the trade-off between equity and growth in the context of tax-financed investment in public capital. Taking into account stylized facts on wealth accumulation, we model agent heterogeneity through differences in saving behavior, income source and time preference. In contrast to the...

Lemoine and Rudik (2017) argue that it is efficient to delay reducing carbon emissions, because there is substantial inertia in the climate system. However, this conclusion rests upon misunderstanding the relevant climate physics: there is no substantial lag between CO2 emissions and warming,...

According to the Globalization Paradox, globalization limits the freedom of choice for national governments. Capital mobility in particular induces tax competition, thus putting downward pressure on capital taxes. However, while capital mobility introduces the inefficiency of tax competition, it...

An economy with clean and dirty intermediate inputs may fall into a trap characterized by low environmental quality and low life expectancy, while the others converge to opposite steady states. We propose new strategies towards sustainable growth. They include: (i) taxes (subsidies) imposed on...

We show that economies may exhibit a strong endogenous macroeconomic adaptation response to climate change. If climate change induces a structural change to the more productive sector, economies can benefit from climate change though productivities in both sectors are reduced. If climate change...

We contribute to the literature on private financing of intergenerational public goods, focusing on climate change mitigation. We consider, in a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with environmental externalities, a contract between successive generations, whereby agents of...