We analyze the welfare implications of property taxation. Using a sufficient statistics approach, we show that the tax incidence depends on how housing prices, labor and other types of incomes as well as public services respond to property tax changes. Empirically, we exploit the German...

Who benefits from the evasion of value added taxes (VAT)? Using a reform that enforced VAT on previously non-compliant large retailers in Armenia, we estimate a onethird passthrough of the tax burden on prices. This suggests that pre-enforcement evasion rents were broadly shared with consumers...

The allocation of free allowances for firms belonging to the carbon leakage list of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) was found to lead to substantial overcompensation, which is why some stakeholders recently have called for a phasing out of free allowances in the near term....

It is widely believed that an environmental tax (price regulation) and cap-and-trade (quantity regulation) are equally efficient in controlling pollution when there is no uncertainty. We show that this is not the case if some consumers (firms, local governments) are morally concerned about...

This paper analyzes the impact of declining extraction costs of shale oil producers on the choice of the policy instrument of a climate coalition in the presence of a monopolistic oil supplier such as OPEC. Shale oil producers' extraction costs represent an upper bound for the oil price OPEC can...

"This essay revisits the question of instrument choice for the regulation of externalities in the context of climate change. The central point is that the Pigouvian prescription to equate marginal control costs with the expected marginal benefits of damage reduction should guide the design of...

Climate protection should use environmental policy instruments that raise revenues, which can be used, for instance, to cut labour taxes to alleviate unemployment in economies suffering from high and persistent unemployment. This paper elaborates the possibilities of an employment dividend of...

"This paper develops a simple model of a polluting industry and an innovating firm. The polluting industry is faced with regulation and costly abatement. Regulation may be taxes or marketable permits. The innovating firm invests in R&D and develops technologies which reduce the cost of pollution...