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The General Equilibrium Incidence of Environmental Taxes

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Author Info
Don Fullerton
Garth Heutel

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Abstract

We study the distributional effects of a pollution tax in general equilibrium, with general forms of substitution where pollution might be a relative complement or substitute for labor or for capital in production. We find closed form solutions for pollution, output prices, and factor prices. Various special cases help clarify the impact of differential factor intensities, substitution effects, and output effects. Intuitively, the pollution tax might place disproportionate burdens on capital if the polluting sector is capital intensive, or if labor is a better substitute for pollution than is capital; however, conditions are found where these intuitive results do not hold. We show exact conditions for the wage to rise relative to the capital return. Plausible values are then assigned to all the parameters, and we find that variations over the possible range of factor intensities have less impact than variations over the possible range of elasticities.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 11311.

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Date of creation: May 2005
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11311

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
Q52 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Pollution Control Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Bovenberg, Lans & Goulder, Lawrence H. & Jacobson, Mark R., 2006. "Costs of alternative environmental policy instruments in the presence of industry compensation requirements," Discussion Paper 127, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research. [Downloadable!]
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