This paper deals with the so-called ‘double dividend’ of an environmental tax reform. In a model with only labor and a polluting input as factors of production, we find that society faces a trade-off between internalizing environmental externalities and raising revenues in the least...

This paper discusses recent reforms of social insurance in the Netherlands. It describes how a serious economic crisis in the beginning of the 1980s set the stage for the subsequent reform process. The most fundamental reforms were introduced in the areas of sickness insurance, which was...

This paper draws on the literature on the double dividend to explore whether an environmental tax reform yields not only a cleaner environment but also non-environmental benefits. In doing so, it investigates how environmental tax reforms impact welfare, the distribution of income, and...

Taxes may seem to be the most attractive instrument for curbing the emissions of carbon dioxide. This paper, however, argues that environmental taxes involve a number of serious complications — especially in an open economy riddled with market imperfections like the Netherlands. Therefore, a...

We investigate the welfare effects of environmental tax reform, i.e. raising environmental taxes and using the proceeds to reduce distortionary taxes on labour. The framework of analysis is a small open economy with involuntary unemployment due to a rigid consumer wage. Environmental tax reform...

We argue in favour of the shareholder model of the firm for three main reasons. First, serving multiple stakeholders leads to ill-defined property rights. What sounds like a fair compromise between stakeholders can easily evolve in a permanent struggle between the stakeholders about the ultimate...