Energy Saving Technological Progress in a Vintage Capital Model

Fossil fuel is an essential input throughout all modern economies. The reduced availability of this basic input to production, and the stabilization of greenhouse gases concentration - which requires reductions in fossil fuel energy use - would have a negative impact in GDP and economic growth through cutbacks in energy use. However, this trade-off between energy reduction and growth could be less severe if energy conservation is raised by ernergy saving technologies. Here we study this hypothesis and, in particular, the effect of tax over the energy expenditure of firms as a way to promote investments in energy saving technologies. To this we consider a general equilibrium model with embodied and exogenous energy saving technological progress in a vintage capital framework, where the scrapping rule is endogenous and linear simplifications are eliminated.