IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/13554.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Incidence of a U.S. Carbon Tax: A Lifetime and Regional Analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Kevin A. Hassett
  • Aparna Mathur
  • Gilbert E. Metcalf

Abstract

This paper measures the direct and indirect incidence of a carbon tax using current income and two measures of lifetime income to rank households. Our results suggest that carbon taxes are more regressive when annual income is used as a measure of economic welfare than when proxies for lifetime income are used. Further, the direct component of the tax, in any given year, is significantly more regressive than the indirect component. In fact, for 1987, the indirect component of the tax is mildly progressive. We observe a modest shift over time with the direct component of carbon taxes becoming less regressive and the indirect component becoming more regressive. These effects mostly offset each other and the distribution of the total tax burden has not changed much over time. In addition we find that regional variation has fluctuated over the years of our anlaysis. By 2003 there is little systematic variation in carbon tax burdens across regions of the country.

Suggested Citation

  • Kevin A. Hassett & Aparna Mathur & Gilbert E. Metcalf, 2007. "The Incidence of a U.S. Carbon Tax: A Lifetime and Regional Analysis," NBER Working Papers 13554, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13554
    Note: EEE PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w13554.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gilbert E. Metcalf, 2008. "An Empirical Analysis of Energy Intensity and Its Determinants at the State Level," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 3), pages 1-26.
    2. S. Paltsev & J. Reilly & H. Jacoby & A. Gurgel & G. Metcalf & A. Sokolov & J. Holak, 2007. "Assessment of U.S. Cap-and-Trade Proposals," Working Papers 0705, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Löschel, Andreas & Pothen, Frank & Schymura, Michael, 2015. "Peeling the onion: Analyzing aggregate, national and sectoral energy intensity in the European Union," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(S1), pages 63-75.
    2. Horowitz, Marvin J. & Bertoldi, Paolo, 2015. "A harmonized calculation model for transforming EU bottom-up energy efficiency indicators into empirical estimates of policy impacts," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 135-148.
    3. Arik Levinson, 2009. "Technology, International Trade, and Pollution from US Manufacturing," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(5), pages 2177-2192, December.
    4. Joseph E. Aldy & William A. Pizer, 2009. "Issues in Designing U.S. Climate Change Policy," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 3), pages 179-210.
    5. Webster, Mort & Sue Wing, Ian & Jakobovits, Lisa, 2010. "Second-best instruments for near-term climate policy: Intensity targets vs. the safety valve," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 250-259, May.
    6. Karimu, Amin & Brännlund, Runar & Lundgren, Tommy & Söderholm, Patrik, 2017. "Energy intensity and convergence in Swedish industry: A combined econometric and decomposition analysis," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 347-356.
    7. Arik Levinson, 2017. "Energy Intensity: Prices, Policy, or Composition in US States," Working Papers gueconwpa~17-17-04, Georgetown University, Department of Economics.
    8. Jean Fouré & Agnès Bénassy-Quéré & Lionel Fontagné, 2012. "The Great Shift : Macroeconomic projections For the World Economy at the 2050 Horizon," Working Papers hal-00962464, HAL.
    9. Jonathan T. Hawkins-Pierot & Katherine R. H. Wagner, 2022. "Technology Lock-In and Optimal Carbon Pricing," CESifo Working Paper Series 9762, CESifo.
    10. Ma, Chunbo, 2014. "A multi-fuel, multi-sector and multi-region approach to index decomposition: An application to China's energy consumption 1995–2010," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 9-16.
    11. McFarland, James R. & Paltsev, Sergey & Jacoby, Henry D., 2009. "Analysis of the Coal Sector under Carbon Constraints," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 404-424, May.
    12. Voigt, Sebastian & De Cian, Enrica & Schymura, Michael & Verdolini, Elena, 2014. "Energy intensity developments in 40 major economies: Structural change or technology improvement?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 47-62.
    13. Pedro Linares & Xavier Labandeira, 2010. "Energy Efficiency: Economics And Policy," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(3), pages 573-592, July.
    14. Joanne Evans & Massimo Filippini & Lester C Hunt, 2011. "Measuring energy efficiency and its contribution towards meeting CO2 targets: estimates for 29 OECD countries," Surrey Energy Economics Centre (SEEC), School of Economics Discussion Papers (SEEDS) 135, Surrey Energy Economics Centre (SEEC), School of Economics, University of Surrey.
    15. Massimo Filippini & Lester C. Hunt, 2013. "'Underlying Energy Efficiency' in the US," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 13/181, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    16. Last Name, First Name, 2009. "Distributional Impacts of Carbon Pricing Policies in the Electricity Sector," RFF Working Paper Series dp-09-43, Resources for the Future.
    17. De Cian, Enrica & Tavoni, Massimo, 2012. "Do technology externalities justify restrictions on emission permit trading?," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 624-646.
    18. den Elzen, Michel & Höhne, Niklas & van Vliet, Jasper, 2009. "Analysing comparable greenhouse gas mitigation efforts for Annex I countries," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 37(10), pages 4114-4131, October.
    19. Jensen, Henning Tarp & Jensen, Hans Grinsted & Gylling, Morten, 2009. "Adoption of GM Food Crop Varieties in the European Union," Conference papers 331886, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    20. Shao, Shuai & Yang, Lili & Yu, Mingbo & Yu, Mingliang, 2011. "Estimation, characteristics, and determinants of energy-related industrial CO2 emissions in Shanghai (China), 1994-2009," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(10), pages 6476-6494, October.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • Q4 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13554. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.