In a sequence of illuminating papers, Goulder, Parry, Burtraw and Williams decompose the effects of using environmental instruments like taxes and quotas within a second-best setting, i.e., in the presence of pre-existing taxes. We find this paer of their analyses most revealing. They also...

The literature on the average and marginal cost of public funds and the average and marginal excess burden is presently a very rich one. A problem in this literature, is that a whole range of alternative measures are interpreted as representing the cost from collecting tax revenues. This paper...

Triest (1990) argues that measuring the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) and the marginal excess burden (MEB) requires equivalent variation measures: MCF should be evaluated at consumer prices while MEB requires the use of producer prices. This paper follows up on Triest's argument by showing...