Tax expenditures are a major source of support for energy related activities in the federal budget exceeding direct budget support for energy by a factor of nearly six. Focusing on the policy goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum consumption, I find these tax expenditures...

Bovenberg and de Mooij (1994) showed that, in the presence of preexisting distorting taxes, the optimal pollution tax typically lies below social marginal damages. Many have viewed this result as a refutation of the so-called double dividend hypothesis,' which suggests that a tax on pollution...

Many distributional analyses of carbon pricing focus on the uses-side incidence of carbon pricing. This is the differential burden resulting from heterogeneity in consumption across households. Once one allows for sources-side incidence (i.e. differential impacts of changes in real factor...

We analyze the distributional and efficiency impacts of different allowance allocation schemes for a national cap and trade system using the USREP model, a new recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy. We consider allocation schemes applied to a comprehensive...

Cap and trade systems are emerging as the front-running policy choice to address climate change concerns in many countries. One of the apparent attractions of this approach is the ability to achieve hard limits on emissions over a control period. The cost of achieving this certainty on emission...

I conclude with some observations on the use of price-based instruments. In particular I discuss how a carbon tax could be designed to achieve environmental goals of emission caps over a control period

The MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis model is applied to synthetic policies that match key attributes of a set of cap-and-trade proposals being considered by the U.S. Congress in spring 2007. The bills fall into two groups: one specifies emissions reductions of 50% to 80% below 1990...

We extend an analytical general equilibrium model of environmental policy with pre-existing labor tax distortions to include pre-existing monopoly power as well. We show that the existence of monopoly power has two offsetting effects on welfare. First, the environmental policy reduces monopoly...

We analyze the quantitative labor market and aggregate effects of a carbon tax in a framework with pollution externalities and equilibrium unemployment. Our model incorporates endogenous labor force participation and two margins of adjustment influenced by carbon taxes: (1) firm creation and (2)...