Nearly all countries tax the domestic consumption of alcoholic beverages. However, the rates of taxation, and the tax instruments used, vary enormously between countries. This paper provides estimates, for a wide range of high-income and developing countries, of the consumer tax equivalents...

Future market developments determine the fate of fossil fuel carbon currently conserved unilaterally. Dynamic fuel depletion naturally suggests leakage rates approaching 100%. Reasons for lower leakage differ from what limits rates in previous studies. Discounting reduces present-value leakage...

This paper examines the case for internationally coordinated indirect taxes on aviation (as a source of general revenue-not (necessarily) as a source of development finance). The case for such taxes is strong: the tax burden on international aviation is currently limited, yet it contributes...

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...

Since the turn of the current century, leading transnational organizations and academic scholarship have identified tax competition among countries as one of the scourges of the international tax regime. Both the EU and the OECD have warned that tax competition erodes the tax bases of Member...

Levelized cost is the preferred method of evaluating various energy technologies. Yet this ubiquitous technique is rarely questioned, and its history is poorly understood. This paper traces the history of levelized cost as a method and highlights its promise and pitfalls. The levelized cost of...

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...

Neither income, consumption, nor wealth is an "ideal" tax base, or one that plausibly identifies what one really should want to tax. Rather, they are best justified as imperfect stand-ins for some underlying (but unobservable) metric of inequality that may be relevant to distributive justice...

This chapter surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83% of the world's population and 91% of the world's GDP in 2013. We address five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading regimes than others? Within...

With the success of the GATT/WTO in reducing conventional tariff barriers, much of the recent focus of both regional and multilateral trade agreements has switched to nontariff measures (NTMs), both border and behind-the-border policies. This chapter considers the recent empirical and...