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Toward A Total-Cost Approach To Environmental Instrument Choice, Daniel H. Cole, Peter Z. Grossman

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Much of the theoretical literature on environmental instrument reflects a normative presumption that only "economic" instruments, such as effluent taxes or tradable quotas, can produce an efficient outcome. Other potential alternatives, such as non-tradable quotas or more general Pigovian taxes are ruled out as inherently inefficient. Moreover, most of the literature relies on an important but unwarranted presumption: that cost and benefit functions, although they may be subject to uncertainty, are identical regardless of the regime that is chosen; that is price and quota systems are assumed to face the same cost and benefit curves with the same expected values. …