Environmental tax schemes in OECD countries often involve tax rates differentiated across industrial, commercial and household sectors. In this paper, we investigate four potentially important arguments for these deviations from uniform taxation: pre-existing tax distortions, domestic equity...

The combination of emissions trading and emissions taxes is usually rejected as redundant or inefficient. This conclusion is based on the restrictive assumption that both policies are exclusively meant to control pollution. However, particularly taxes may pursue a variety of other policy...

Cap and trade mechanisms enjoy increasing importance in environmental legislation worldwide. The most prominent example is probably given by the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) designed to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, several other countries already have or are planning...

Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

We show how corrective taxation can improve the efficiency properties of tradable quotas systems affected by market power. Indeed, when only a subset of firms are price takers while the remaining firms enjoy market power, we show that, if the regulator sets an ad hoc taxation on firms' traded...

This paper analyses environmental fiscal policy within a two-sector endogenous growth model with elastic labour supply. Pollution is modelled as a side product of production. The framework allows us to analyse the consequences of an environmental tax on the economic dynamics. Both transitional...

Inherited wealth creates a second distinguishing characteristic of individuals, in addition to earning abilities. We incorporate this fact into a model of optimal labor income taxation, with bequests motivated by joy of giving. We find that taxes on bequests or on inheritances allow further...

Presumptive taxation, in which an income proxy is used as tax base, has been and is still used today in countries with very diverse situations - developing, transition and developed countries. Usually, this form of taxation is thought of as a revenue-raising device in presence of widespread...

We study the structure of optimal wealth and labor income taxes in a Mirrlees economy in which the productivity of labor (i.e., skill) is private, stochastic, and endogenous. Individual agents' skills are determined by their level of human capital. Human capital is not publicly observable and...