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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Allocation Of Permits In U.S. Climate Change Legislation, Don Fullerton, Daniel Karney
The Allocation Of Permits In U.S. Climate Change Legislation, Don Fullerton, Daniel Karney
Don Fullerton
Don Fullerton and Daniel Karney of the University of Illinois take a hard look at the allocation of CO2 emissions permits under the Waxman-Markey bill and give it minimally passing marks.
Distributional Effects Of Environmental And Energy Policy: An Introduction, Don Fullerton
Distributional Effects Of Environmental And Energy Policy: An Introduction, Don Fullerton
Don Fullerton
This chapter reviews literature on the distributional effects of environmental and energy policy. In particular, many effects of such policy are likely regressive. First, it raises the price of fossil-fuel-intensive products, expenditures on which are a high fraction of low-income budgets. Second, if abatement technologies are capital-intensive, then any mandate to abate pollution may induce firms to use more capital. If demand for capital is raised relative to labor, then a lower relative wage may also hurt low-income households. Third, pollution permits handed out to firms bestow scarcity rents on well-off individuals who own those firms. Fourth, low-income individuals may …
The General Equilibrium Incidence Of Environmental Taxes, Don Fullerton, Garth Heutel
The General Equilibrium Incidence Of Environmental Taxes, Don Fullerton, Garth Heutel
Don Fullerton
We study the distributional effects of a pollution tax in general equilibrium, with general forms of substitution where pollution might be a relative complement or substitute for labor or for capital in production. We find closed form solutions for pollution, output prices, and factor prices. Various special cases help clarify the impact of differential factor intensities, substitution effects, and output effects. Intuitively, the pollution tax might place disproportionate burdens on capital if the polluting sector is capital intensive, or if labor is a better substitute for pollution than is capital; however, conditions are found where these intuitive results do not …
A Framework To Compare Environmental Policies, Don Fullerton
A Framework To Compare Environmental Policies, Don Fullerton
Don Fullerton
This paper analyzes and compares eight types of policies. Clearly no single policy instrument will work best in all cases. Under some circumstances, command and control (CAC) instruments might be necessary, in either of two forms: (a) emission restrictions, sometimes called "performance standards," or (b) technology restrictions that might be called "design standards." In other cases that are important to identify, these command and control instruments can be replaced by "incentive" instruments such as taxes, subsidies, or permits. As suggested by Arthur Pigou (1932), the pollution problem could be addressed by (a) taxes on the pollution, or (b) subsidies to …