Following a Federal Constitutional Court sentence, wealth tax has not been levied in Germany since 1997. A possible revival has since regularly been the subject of political debate. Several German federal states are currently preparing to submit a bill to the Bundesrat. A basic scenario...

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980 follows the "polluter pays" principle by placing retroactive liability on responsible firms. Yet this cost is borne by current shareholders who did not benefit from past low-cost waste management. This...

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...

Additional solid waste disposal imposes resource and environmental costs, but most residents still pay no additional fee per marginal unit of garbage collection. In a simple model with garbage and recycling as the only two disposal options, we show that the optimizing fee for garbage collection...

When government needs more revenue than is available from a pollution tax rate equal to marginal environmental damage, our intuition tells us to raise the tax on the clean good above zero and to raise the tax on the dirty good above that first-best Pigouvian rate. Yet new results suggest that...

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...

Using three years of data from the 47 prefectures of Japan, we estimate behavior of households who simultaneously make discrete decisions about vehicle ownership and continuous decisions about driving distance. We use the estimated parameters to calculate elasticities and to simulate the effects...

Pollution taxes are believed to burden low-income households that spend a greater than average share of income on pollution-intensive goods. Some propose to offset that effect by returning revenue to low-income workers via reduced labor tax. We build analytical general equilibrium models with...

We build a simple analytical general equilibrium model and linearize it, to find a closed-from expression for the effect of a small change in carbon tax on leakage - the increase in emissions elsewhere. The model has two goods produced in two sectors or regions. Many identical consumers buy both...