China is planning to implement the largest CO₂ emissions trading system in the world. To reduce emissions, the system will be a tradable performance standard (TPS), an emissions pricing mechanism that differs significantly from the emissions pricing instruments used in other countries, such as...

This paper assesses the impacts across US household income groups of carbon taxes of various designs. We consider both the source-side impacts (reflecting how policies affect nominal wage, capital, and transfer incomes) and the use-side impacts (reflecting how policies alter prices of goods and...

Pricing carbon emissions from a jurisdiction could harm the competitiveness of local firms, causing the leakage of emissions and economic activity to other regions. Past research concentrated on national carbon prices, but the impacts of subnational carbon prices could be more severe due to the...

We synthesize and review retrospective analyses of federal air quality regulations to examine the contributions of the Clean Air Act to the vast air quality improvements seen since 1970. Geographic heterogeneity in stringency affects emissions, public health, compliance costs, and employment....

The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term “human capital,” seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The...

There has been keen interest in recent years in environmentally motivated or 'green' tax reforms. This paper employs analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to investigate the costs of such reforms, concentrating on the question of whether these costs can be eliminated when revenues...

The most cost-effective policies for achieving CO2 abatement (e.g., carbon taxes) fail to get off the ground politically because of unacceptable distributional consequences. This paper explores CO2 abatement policies designed to address distributional concerns. Using an intertemporal numerical...

This paper examines the choice between revenue-raising and non-revenue-raising instruments for environmental protection in a second-best setting with pre- existing factor taxes. We find that interactions with pre-existing taxes influence the costs of regulation and seriously militate against...

In recent years there has been great interest in the possibility of substituting environmentally motivated or 'green' taxes for ordinary income taxes. Some have suggested that such revenue-neutral reforms might offer a 'double dividend:' not only (1) improve the environment but also (2) reduce...

In this paper we explore the efficiency gains from the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and prospective tax reforms, separating out the intersectoral and intertemporal efficiency consequences. To assess these effects, we employ a general equilibrium model that considers the effects of taxes on the...