Because of difficulties measuring pollution, many prior papers suggest a subsidy to some observable method of reducing pollution. We take three such papers as examples, and we extend each of them to show how welfare under the suggested subsidy can be increased by the addition of an output tax....

Abstract

Definitions can matter, and Don Fullerton and Michael Geruso argue that proponents of social security privatization mean a host of different things by "privatization." They point out that many of the gains from privatization seen by economists like Martin Feldstein and Laurence Kotlikoff owe to...

On a topic like the environment, communication among scholars from different disciplines in the natural and social sciences is both important and difficult, but such communication has been far from perfect. Economists themselves may have contributed to some rather fundamental misunderstandings...

Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a Social Security program that reduces overall inequality by...

This study develops a theoretical general equilibrium model to examine optimal externality tax policy in the presence of externalities linked to one another through markets rather than technical production relationships. Analytical results reveal that the second-best externality tax rate may be...

While prior literature has identified various effects of environmental policy, this note uses the example of a proposed carbon permit system to illustrate and discuss six different types of distributional effects: (1) higher prices of carbon-intensive products, (2) changes in relative returns to...

We analyze both the uses side and the sources side incidence of domestic climate policy using an analytical general equilibrium model, taking into account the degree of government program indexing. When transfer programs such as Social Security are explicitly indexed to inflation, higher energy...

We build a simple analytical general equilibrium model and linearize it, to find a closed-from expression for the effect of a small change in carbon tax on leakage - the increase in emissions elsewhere. The model has two goods produced in two sectors or regions. Many identical consumers buy both...

Policy intervention in the biofuel market has led to a significant increase in biofuel production and use in the past several years. However, the welfare effect of biofuelpolicies, specifically the ethanol tax credit for corn ethanol, ethanol import tariff andrenewable fuel standard (RFS)...