Experts often disagree. A decision-maker may be averse to such expert disagreement. Existing models of aversion to expert disagreement rest on ambiguity-averse preferences adopting a unanimity principle: If all experts consider one choice better than another, so should the decision-maker. Such...

Passenger transport has significant externalities, including carbon emissions and air pollution. Public health research has identified additional social gains from active travel, due to the health benefits of physical exercise. Per mile, these benefits greatly exceed the external costs from car...

Financing productive public capital through distortionary taxes typically creates a trade-off: the optimal investment is determined as a compromise between efficiency-enhancing public investment and perturbing market efficiency, but is never socially optimal. In contrast, such a trade-off can...

Imperfect altruism between generations may lead to insufficient capital accumulation. We study the welfare consequences of taxing the rent on a fixed production factor, such as land, in this setting. We prove that taxing the rent is welfare-enhancing as it increases capital investment. This...

We study the impact of heterogeneous saving behavior on the distributional effects of public investment. A capital tax is levied to finance productive public capital in an economy with two types of households: high income households who save dynastically and middle income households who save for...

We study the trade-off between equity and growth in the context of tax-financed investment in public capital. Taking into account stylized facts on wealth accumulation, we model agent heterogeneity through differences in saving behavior, income source and time preference. In contrast to the...

Carbon pricing regulates emission flows and collects rents from underlying fossil resource stocks. The resulting investment shift implies lower climate policy costs and improved welfare if capital is underaccumulated. We prove that under emission trading, such a beneficial macroeconomic...

Climate change economics mostly neglects sizeable interactions of carbon pricing with other fiscal policy instruments. Conversely, public finance typically overlooks the effects of future decarbonization efforts when devising instruments for the major goals of fiscal policy. We argue that such a...

Avoiding unmanageable climate change implies that global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced rapidly. A significant body of literature shows that policy instruments such as carbon prices can make an important contribution to this goal. In contrast, changes in preferences or values are...