This paper develops a model of a small open economy that produces an export good with domestic labour and imported energy and is stuck in an unemployment situation resulting from an excessive fixed net-of-tax wage rate. We study a revenue-neutral green tax reform that substitutes energy for wage...

This paper uses analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to study the costs of achieving pollution reductions under a range of environmental policy instruments in a second-best setting with pre-existing factor taxes. We compare the costs and efficiency impacts of emissions taxes,...

Numerous recent studies have indicated that interactions with a tax-distorted labor market increase the cost of pollution regulation. However, these studies have made restrictive assumptions regarding individual preferences and have ignored key links between pollution, human health, and labor...

The literature on environmental taxation in the presence of pre-existing distortionary taxes has shown that the interactions with pre-existing taxes tend to raise the cost of an environmental tax, and thus that the optimal environmental tax in that context is less than marginal environmental...

There has been keen interest in recent years in environmentally motivated or 'green' tax reforms. This paper employs analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to investigate the costs of such reforms, concentrating on the question of whether these costs can be eliminated when revenues...

We study the incidence of pollution taxes and their impact on unemployment in an analytical general equilibrium efficiency wage model. We find closed-form solutions for the effect of a pollution tax on unemployment, factor prices, and output prices, and we identify and isolate different channels...

This paper analyzes the effects of environmental policy on employment (and unemployment) using a new general-equilibrium two-sector search model. We find that imposing a pollution tax causes substantial reductions in employment in the regulated (polluting) industry, but this is offset by...

Using a general equilibrium model of the United States economy,we examine the combined welfare cost of all taxes in the U.S. revenue system.We find that the welfare losses caused by distortionary taxation can be very large, both on average and at the margin.The marginal welfare loss to consumers...

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...

This chapter provides an overview of key economic issues in the use of taxation as an instrument of environmental policy in the UK. It first reviews economic arguments for using taxes and other market mechanisms in environmental policy, discusses the choice of tax base, and considers the value...