Pigouvian taxes can fully correct for market failures due to externalities, but actual policies are commonly forced to deviate from the Pigouvian ideal due to administrative or political constraints. This paper derives sufficient statistics, which require a minimum of market information, that...

We measure the pass-through of emissions costs to electricity prices and explore its determinants. We perform both reduced-form and structural estimations based on optimal bidding in this market. Using rich micro-level data, we estimate the channels affecting pass-through in a flexible manner,...

Using three years of data from the 47 prefectures of Japan, we estimate behavior of households who simultaneously make discrete decisions about vehicle ownership and continuous decisions about driving distance. We use the estimated parameters to calculate elasticities and to simulate the effects...

We study a dynamic model in which the interaction between debt accumulation and asset prices magnifies credit booms and busts. We find that borrowers do not internalize these feedback effects and therefore suffer from excessively large booms and busts in both credit flows and asset prices. We...

Although the corrective tax has long been viewed by economists as a theoretically desirable remedy for the problem of harmful externalities, its actual use has been limited, mainly to the domain of pollution. Liability, in contrast, has great importance in controlling harmful externalities. I...

I characterize the optimal financial regulation policy in an economy where financial intermediaries trade capital assets on behalf of households, but must retain an equity stake to align incentives. Financial regulation is necessary because intermediaries cannot be excluded from privately...

The intermittency of payment for many goods creates a disconnect between paying and consuming such that the marginal price is not always salient when consumption decisions are made. This paper derives optimal dynamic corrective taxes when there are externalities as well as internalities from...

This paper examines how the optimal Pigouvian tax should be adjusted to reflect administrative costs. Several cases are examined, depending on whether the administrative costs are fixed per firm taxed or are a function of the amount of tax collected, and on whether such costs are borne by the...

Despite technological advances, an individual car's emissions still cannot be measured reliably enough to impose a Pigovian tax. This paper explores alternative market incentives that could be used instead. We solve for second-best combinations of uniform taxes on gasoline, engine size, and...

The standard theory that the first-best tax on pollution is equal to marginal environmental damages has been extended in two directions. First, many polluting activities are difficult to tax because they are not market transactions, and so recent papers have shown that the same effects can be...