There has been intense focus on the issue of how emissions allowances might be allocated under a potential federal cap-and-trade program. What fraction of the allowances should be auctioned out, as opposed to given out free? How much free allocation would be sufficient to preserve profits in...

Carbon taxes are a potential revenue source that could play a key role in major tax reform. This paper employs a numerical general equilibrium model of the United States to evaluate alternative tax reductions that could be financed by the revenues from a carbon tax. We consider a carbon tax that...

Fourteen U.S. states recently pledged to adopt limits on automobile greenhouse gases (GHGs) per mile in an effort to reduce GHG emissions. We show that, because of interactions between this effort and the federal CAFE standard, 70-80 percent of the emissions reductions from new cars in adopting...

We examine the extent to which various environmental policy instruments meet major evaluation criteria, including cost-effectiveness, distributional equity, minimization of risk in the presence of uncertainty, and political feasibility. Instruments considered include emissions taxes, tradable...

This paper employs analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to examine the optimal setting of environmental taxes in the presence of pre-existing distortionary taxes. Both models indicate, contrary to what several analysts have suggested, that the optimal environmental tax rate in...

Using analytical and numerical general equilibrium models, we show that pre-existing factor taxes produce a "tax-interaction effect" that substantially increases the costs of pollution taxes and quotas. Under policies that raise revenue and recycle it through cuts in marginal factor tax rates,...