Environmental taxes with heterogeneous consumers: an application to energy consumption in France

This paper constructs a model with four groups of households who have preferences over labor supply, consumption of polluting (energy related) and non-polluting (non-energy) goods, and emissions. It quantifies the model for the French economy and computes its optimal tax equilibria under nine second-best tax regimes. We find that the redistributive role of environmental taxes requires the polluting goods to be taxed at a rate much below their marginal social damage. These goods may even require an outright subsidy if the society values equality ‘a lot’. Secondly, if environmental taxes that have an exclusively externality-correcting role, they benefit all types—although the gains are rather modest. The gains and losses become more substantial when environmental taxes have a redistributive role as well. Third, setting the environmental tax at its Pigouvian level, rather than its optimal externality-correcting-cum-redistributive level, benefits the high-income group at the expense of the low-income groups. Fourth, nonlinear taxation of polluting goods, and nonlinear commodity taxation in general, is a powerful redistributive mechanism. Fifth, introducing environmental taxes in the current French tax system, with its suboptimal income taxes, results in substantial welfare gains for the highest income group and a sizable loss for the least well-off persons.     

Service Quality,Competition, and Regulatory Policies in the Postal Sector

This paper presents a simple model which illustrates the possible policy- and welfare-implications of endogenous product selection in the postal sector. The cost of a unit of mail depends on its "quality" (e.g., speed of delivery) and on the type and location of the addressee (firms, urban households, and rural households). Senders have inelastic demands and differ in their willingness to pay for quality. Addressees are passive but their utility may affect social welfare. Two operators play a two-stage game, first choosing qualities and then prices. We first show that the equilibrium with two private (profit maximizing) operators results in an inefficient provision of quality. Then, we consider the mixed (Nash) equilibrium with one private and one (welfare maximizing) public operator. If the budget constraint of the public firm is not binding, this equilibrium is shown to be first-best efficient even if social welfare accounts for the utility of addressees. If the budget constraint is binding, the mixed equilibrium is not efficient but yields a higher level of welfare than the private equilibrium. Finally, we study the impact of minimum quality standards within our setting.     

Life Expectancy Heterogeneity and the Political Support for Collective Annuities

Individuals, differing in productivity and life expectancy, vote over the size and type of a collective annuity. Its type is represented by the fraction of the contributive (Bismarckian) component (based on the worker's past earnings) as opposed to the non‐contributive (Beveridgean) part (based on average contribution). The equilibrium collective annuity is either a large mostly Bismarckian program, a smaller pure Beveridgean one (in accordance with empirical evidence), or nil. A larger correlation between longevity and productivity, or a larger average life expectancy, both make the equilibrium collective annuity program more Beveridgean, although at the expense of its size.     

Accidental Bequests: A Curse for the Rich and a Boon for the Poor*

When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics, such as productivity and longevity, the population should be partitioned into two groups: those who do not receive an inheritance and those who do. The first tagged group receives a Mirrlees second‐best tax schedule; the second group, when its type is fully revealed, faces a first‐best tax schedule. Receiving an inheritance makes high‐ability types worse off and low‐ability types better off. High‐ability individuals face a bequest tax of more than 100 percent, while low‐ability types face a bequest tax that can be smaller, as well as larger, than 100 percent, and it might even be negative.     

Demographic Shock and Social Security: A Political Economy Perspective

We assume that individual voters differ not only according to age but also productivity. In the steady state, workers with wages in the intermediate range join the retired persons to form a majority and vote for a positive level of social security. When a shock decreases population growth, entrenched interests can constrain majority voting decisions and prevent reforms in the name of entitlements. We show that from a Rawlsian viewpoint it may be desirable to rely on these entitlements to protect the low wage earners of the transition generations. However, when the possibility of fixing a basic pension is introduced, it constitutes a better instrument than entitlements.     

Uncertainty, Commitment, and Optimal Taxation

This paper examines the optimal tax design problem in the presence of wage uncertainty. The wage has a continuous distribution, individuals are ex ante identical, preferences are separable in labor supply and goods, public policy aims at providing the population with social insurance, and the only restriction on the tax instruments is that emanating from lack of public observability of realized wages and labor supplies. We show that optimal tax structures depend crucially on whether it is labor supply or goods that consumers have to commit to before the resolution of uncertainty. Specifically, we prove that, in the absence of commitment, the social insurance problem collapses to the traditional optimal tax problem. Second, if labor supply is precommitted, it would be possible to effect a first-best outcome. Third, commitment to goods would make indirect taxation a useful instrument of tax policy even in the presence of a general income tax; it requires differential tax treatment of committed and noncommitted goods. Finally, if preferences are separable between the two types of goods, precommitted goods must be taxed at a uniform rate lower than that on the noncommitted goods.     

Competition in Two-Sided Markets with Common Network Externalities

We study competition in two-sided markets with a common network externality rather those than with the standard inter-group effects. This type of externality occurs when both groups benefit, possibly with different intensities, from an increase in the size of one group and from a decrease in the size of the other. We explain why common externality is relevant for the health and education sectors. We focus on symmetric equilibrium and show that when the externality itself satisfies a homogeneity condition then platforms’ profits and price structures have some specific properties. Our results reveal how the rents coming from network externalities are shifted by platforms from one side to the other, according to the homogeneity degree. Prices are affected but in such a way that platforms only transfer rents from consumers to providers. In the specific but realistic case where the common network externality is homogeneous of degree zero, platforms’ profits do not depend on the intensity of the (common) network externality. This result differs from those of the two-sided models, which deal with standard positive inter-group network externality.     

Second-Best Pollution Taxes and the Structure of Preferences

We characterize optimal taxes on polluting and nonpolluting goods in Ramsey and Mirrlees second-best environments. The polluting good tax differs from the Pigouvian tax by Ramsey terms in the first and by Stiglitz/Mirrlees plus another adjustment term in the second. These terms can be positive, negative, or zero. If preferences are weakly separable in public and private goods, with the private good subutility weakly separable in labor and produced goods, nonpolluting goods are taxed uniformly and the concept of a tax differential between polluting and nonpolluting goods is well defined. The differential is then less than the Pigouvian tax in the Ramsey framework, but it can be greater, equal to, or smaller than the Pigouvian tax in the Mirrlees second best. In Mirrlees second best, if preferences are separable in labor supply and other goods, the second-best tax differential is identical to the Pigouvian tax.