In the context of emission trading it seems to be taken as given that people's preferences can be ignored with respect to the whole process of fixing emission targets and allocating emission permits to polluters. With this paper we want to reopen the debate on how citizens can be involved in...

Calling upon both positive and normative economics, we attempt to characterize the issues at stake in the current international negotiations on climatic change. We begin (Section 2) by reviewing the main features of the Protocol. Then (Section 3), we identify by means of an elementary economic...

This survey reviews the recent literature on the double-dividend hypothesis of environmental taxes and discusses some recent extensions of the standard model such as the distributional consequences and the importance of the non-separability assumption between consumption goods and environmental...

This paper concerns international coordination of environmental taxation. The main contribution of the paper is to provide a frame-work for dynamic cost benefit analysis of environmental tax reforms in a global economy with transboundary environmental problems. We show that the welfare effects...

In a two-country reciprocal dumping model, with one country unionized, we analyze how wage setting and firm location are influenced by trade liberalization. We show that trade liberalization can induce FDI, which is at odds with conventional theoretical wisdom and cannot happen in a...

In 1999 the EU abolished duty-free on intra-EU travel, whilst other countries still retain duty-free shopping for international travellers. We adress several aspects of duty-free trade, including effects on consumption, revenue and price-setting. From a global perspective we identify the...

This paper deals with the efficiency and distributional consequences of a switch from the current German income and corporate tax system to one special variant of an intertemporally neutral tax, an extended ACE (allowance for corporate equity) corporation tax. This tax is favoured by the IFS...

This paper analyzes the intergenerational incidence of wage and consumption taxes imposed to finance a given amount of public expenditures. It employs a continuous time overlapping generations framework to demonstrate that it essentially hinges on the relationship between the age-earnings and...

This paper analyzes the effects of an income splitting system on marriage partners. The focus is on the time allocation, on investment in marriage-specific human capital and on the distribution of income within the family. Two insights are discussed in detail. First, the distribution of...

We examine how emission taxes should be refunded to firms in order to create optimal incentives to invest in cleaner technologies. Since refunds cannot be made dependent on investments, an alternative way is to give back taxes to firms according to market shares. We show that universally...