In a Ramsey policy regime, heterogeneity in beliefs about the potential costs of climate change is shown to produce policy ambiguities that alter carbon prices and taxation. Three sources of ambiguity are considered: (i) the private sector is skeptical, with beliefs that are unknown to the...

Empirical evidence evaluating the efficiency of economic instruments is still rare, despite significant theoretical advances over the last decades. The objective of this paper is to evaluate one form of environmental taxation, the French tax on air pollution from 1990-99. While starting out in...

In actual environmental policy, the design of actual pollution emission taxes differs significantly with the optimal Pigovian tax. In particular, earmarking prevails and actual taxes are usually combined with regulation. Furthermore tax rates are generally too low to significantly influence...

This study evaluates the impact of fuel taxes on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly new car registrations in France. We use information on the car holder to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers, and we identify demand parameters through the...

This paper is a quasi-replication of Andersson (2019). I use the synthetic control method to estimate the effect of a carbon tax starting at $1.41 per tonne of CO2 and increased through successive reforms to $20 by 2011. The results show that, one year after the intervention, the tax reduced CO2...

Most studies on the green tax reform issue point out that environmental taxes exacerbate pre-existing tax distortions, thereby increasing the welfare costs associated with the overall tax code. As a result, the optimal environmental tax should lie below the Pigovian level (or marginal social...

Empirical evidence evaluating the efficiency of economic instruments is still rare, despite significant theoretical advances over the last decades. The objective of this paper is to evaluate one form of environmental taxation, the French tax on air pollution from 1990-99. While starting out in...

Considering a differentiated mixed duopoly we show that when privatization and pollution tax are used together environmental damage will be non-monotone in the level of privatization, and optimal privatization is always partial privatization. Whether privatization will improve the environment or...

We examine the e®ect of an emission tax when the abatement good or service is supplied by an imperfectly competitive eco-industry with free entry. We show that a higher tax always increases the number of ¯rms in the eco-industry whereas it has an ambiguous e®ect on indi- vidual and total...