The MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis model is applied to synthetic policies that match key attributes of a set of cap-and-trade proposals being considered by the U.S. Congress in spring 2007. The bills fall into two groups: one specifies emissions reductions of 50% to 80% below 1990...

Information provision is a key element of government energy-efficiency policy, but the information that is provided is often too coarse to allow consumers to make efficient decisions. An important example is the ubiquitous yellow “EnergyGuide” label, which is required by law to be displayed...

This paper presents a novel methodology for estimating impacts on domestic supply of oil and natural gas arising from changes in the tax treatment of oil and gas production. It corrects a downward bias when the ratio of aggregate tax expenditures to domestic production is used to measure the...

We analyze the distributional and efficiency impacts of different allowance allocation schemes for a national cap and trade system using the USREP model, a new recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy. We consider allocation schemes applied to a comprehensive...

Cap and trade systems are emerging as the front-running policy choice to address climate change concerns in many countries. One of the apparent attractions of this approach is the ability to achieve hard limits on emissions over a control period. The cost of achieving this certainty on emission...

This paper provides a simple analytic approach for measuring the burden of carbon pricing that does not require sophisticated and numerically intensive economic models but which is not limited to restrictive assumptions of forward shifting of carbon prices. We also show how to adjust for the...

Policy makers often express concern about the impact of carbon taxes on employment and GDP. Focusing on European countries that have implemented carbon taxes over the past 30 years, we estimate the macroeconomic impacts of these taxes on GDP and employment growth rates for various specifications...

I use data from the 1994 Consumer Expenditure Survey as well as other sources to measure the distributional impact of green tax reforms and consumption tax reforms using both annual income and lifetime income approaches to rank households. A modest tax reform in which environmental taxes equal...

An important factor driving energy policy over the past two decades has been the Energy Paradox,' the perception that consumers apply unreasonably high hurdle rates to energy saving investments. We explore one possible explanation for this apparent puzzle: that realized returns fall short of the...