This paper builds a single model that can be used to show efficiency and distributional effects of eight different types of environmental policies (including taxes, subsidies, regulations, permits, and legal liability). All eight approaches can be designed to have the same efficiency effects,...

Despite technological advances, an individual car's emissions still cannot be measured reliably enough to impose a Pigovian tax. This paper explores alternative market incentives that could be used instead. We solve for second-best combinations of uniform taxes on gasoline, engine size, and...

We explore the effects of environmental taxes that imprecisely target pollution. A review of actual policies indicates few (if any) examples of a true tax on pollution. More typically, environmental taxes target an input or output that is correlated with pollution. We construct a simple...

A tax on vehicle emissions can efficiently induce all of the cheapest forms of abatement. Consumers could drive less, buy a smaller car with better gas mileage, use cleaner gasoline, and repair pollution control equipment (PCE). However, the technology is not yet available to measure and tax...

The double-dividend hypothesis' suggests that increased taxes on polluting activities can provide two kinds of benefits. The first is an improvement in the environment, and the second is an improvement in economic efficiency from the use of environmental tax revenues to reduce other taxes such...

Debate about the Double Dividend Hypothesis has focused on whether an environmental policy raises revenue that can be used to cut other distorting taxes. In this paper, we show that this focus is misplaced. We derive welfare results for alternative policies in a series of analytical general...

This paper estimates the impact of a user fee and a curbside recycling program on garbage and recycling amounts, allowing for the possibility of endogenous policy choices. Previous estimates of the effects of these policies could be biased if unobserved variables such as local preference for the...

This paper builds two simple general equilibrium models to demonstrate the equivalence between the Pigovian tax and the combination of a presumptive tax and an environmental subsidy. A presumptive tax is a tax that is imposed under the presumption that all production uses a dirty technology or...

Fundamental tax reform may change relative prices of consumption goods and may therefore have important effects on the uses side that are ignored by most general equilibrium simulation models. For a uniform rate of tax, in our model, results on the uses side are driven by the nonuniform tax...

We analyze alternative policies such as a disposal content fee, a subsidy for recyclable designs, unit pricing of household disposal, a deposit-refund system, and a manufacturer `take-back' requirement. In order to identify the problem being addressed, we build a simple general equilibrium model...