Several policy makers and economists have proposed the adoption of a carbon tax in the United States. It is widely recognized that such a tax in practice must take the form of a tax on the consumption of energy products such as gasoline. Although a large existing literature examines the...

We estimate a model of vehicle choice and kilometers driven to analyze the long-run impacts of fuel conservation policies in the Indian car market. We simulate the effects of petrol and diesel fuel taxes and a diesel car tax, taking into account their interactions with the pre-existing petrol...

The incidence of taxes on consumers and producers plays a central role in evaluating energy tax policy, yet the literature testing the main predictions of the tax incidence model is sparse. In this paper, we examine the pass-through rate of state gasoline and diesel taxes to retail prices, and...

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) "Sinews of Power," attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with...

A tax on vehicle emissions can efficiently induce all of the cheapest forms of abatement. Consumers could drive less, buy a smaller car with better gas mileage, use cleaner gasoline, and repair pollution control equipment (PCE). However, the technology is not yet available to measure and tax...

A common feature of federal systems is that tax bases are joint property. Consequently, state and federal tax setting decisions are interdependent. Our aim here is to put forward a rudimentary theoretical analysis of this phenomenon, and to use the theory as a framework for econometrically...

In many countries the revenue from gasoline taxes is used to fund highways and other transportation infrastructure. As the number of electric vehicles on the road increases, this raises questions about the effectiveness and equity of this financing mechanism. In this paper, we ask whether...

Most studies suggest that environmental taxes are regressive, and thus are unattractive policy options. We consider the distributional effects of a gasoline tax increase using three welfare measures and under three scenarios for gas tax revenue use. To incorporate behavioral responses we use...

Claims of the regressivity of gasoline taxes typically rely on annual surveys of consumer income and expenditures which show that gasoline expenditures are a larger fraction of income for very low income households than for middle or high-income households. This paper argues that annual...

Analyses of policies to reduce gasoline consumption have focused on two effects, a compositional effect on the fuel economy of the automotive fleet and a utilization effect on how much people drive. However, the literature has missed a third effect: a matching effect, in which the policy changes...