Environmental tax schemes in OECD countries often involve tax rates differentiated across industrial, commercial and household sectors. In this paper, we investigate four potentially important arguments for these deviations from uniform taxation: pre-existing tax distortions, domestic equity...

This paper investigates the economic impacts of environmental tax reforms designed to reach given emission reduction targets for the German economy. Our focus is on the efficiency and employment implications of alternative schemes for emission tax differentiation between the production sector...

Global impact assessment of unilateral climate policies is commonly based on multi‐sector, multi‐region computable general equilibrium (CGE) models that are calibrated to consistent accounts of production, consumption, and bilateral trade flows. However, global economic databases such as...

Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

In the tax policy debate, differentiation of value-added taxes is often justified by distributional concerns. Our quantitative analysis for Germany indicates that such concerns are misplaced. We find that the abolition of VAT differentiation has only negligible redistributive effects. Instead,...

The economic effects of environmental taxes depend on the market structure. Under imperfect competition with free entry and exit, environmental taxes have an impact on economies of scale by changing the number and size of firms. Whether economies of scale rise or fall in a particular industry...