Strategic monetary and fiscal policy interactions: An empirical investigation

This paper identifies leadership regimes in monetary-fiscal policy interactions in three countries, the UK, the US and Sweden. We specify a small-scale, structural general equilibrium model of an open economy and estimate it using Bayesian methods. We assume that the authorities can act strategically in a non-cooperative policy game, and compare different leadership regimes. We find that the model of fiscal leadership gives the best fit for the UK and Sweden, while in the US the Nash or non-strategic regime dominates. We assess the extent to which policy maker preferences reflect microfounded social preferences.     

Complex,dynamic environmental policies

The environment provides two different kinds of services: consumptive (input for conventional goods' production, pollution) and non-consumptive (amenity). The environment, which is treated as a renewable resource, might be harvested to obtain the first service, pollution (e.g., emissions, waste). However, reducing current pollution is costly and takes time; this adjustment process provides the second state. We show in this paper that the associated optimal environmental policies may be complex. More precisely, dampened oscillations and limit cycles (pollution following abatement and so on) may describe an optimal strategy even for strictly concave technologies and preferences. However, complex strategies—limit cycles and instabilities—are restricted to weakly green social preferences.     

Weak complementarity and production

This paper describes how weak complementarity, a common assumption to characterize consumer preferences for recovering measures of willingness to pay for nonmarketed environmental resources, can be used to evaluate the effects of pollution that may affect profits or costs. In such cases, pollution serves as an externality imposed by third parties on production activities.     

Allowing for Household Preferences in Emission Trading – A Contribution to the Climate Policy Debate

In the context of emission trading it seems to be taken as given that people's preferences can be ignored with respect to the whole process of fixing emission targets and allocating emission permits to polluters. With this paper we want to reopen the debate on how citizens can be involved in this process. We try to show how citizen preferences can be included in the process of pollution control through emission trading. We propose an emission trading system where all emission permits are initially allocated to households who are then allowed to sell them in the permit market or to withhold (at least some of) them in order to reduce total pollution. This proposal tries to overcome the fundamental disadvantage of traditional permit systems which neglect consumer preferences by solely distributing emission permits to producers / polluters. In our system the property right to nature is re-allocated to the households who obtain the opportunity of reducing actual emissions according to their personal preferences by withholding a part or all of the emission permits allotted to them. Such a change in environmental policy would mark a return to the traditional principles of consumer sovereignty by involving households (at least partially) in the social abatement decision process instead of excluding them. Another advantage of admitting households to the TEP market as sellers or buyers of permits is that this increases the number of agents in the permit market and thus significantly reduces the possibilities of strategic market manipulations.     

Social identity and preferences over redistribution

We design an experiment to study the effects of social identity on preferences over redistribution. The experiment highlights the trade-off between social identity concerns and maximization of monetary payoffs. Subjects belonging to two distinct natural groups are randomly assigned gross incomes and vote over alternative redistributive tax regimes, where the regime is chosen by majority rule. We find that a significant subset of the subjects systematically deviate from monetary payoff maximization towards the tax rate that benefits their group when the monetary cost of doing so is not too high. These deviations cannot be explained by efficiency concerns, inequality aversion, reciprocity, social learning or conformity. Finally, we show that behavior in the lab helps explain the relationship between reported income and stated preferences over redistribution observed in survey data.     

Taxes or Fees? The Political Economy of Providing Excludable Public Goods

This paper provides a positive analysis of public provision of excludable public goods financed by uniform taxes or fees. Individuals differing in preferences decide, using majority rule, the provision level and financing instrument. The decisive voter has median preferences in a tax regime, but generally has above median preferences in a fee regime. Numerical solutions indicate that populations with uniform or left‐skewed distributions of preferences choose taxes, while a majority coalition of high‐ and low‐preference individuals prefer fees when preferences are sufficiently right skewed. Public good provision and welfare under fees exceeds that under taxes in the latter case.     

Optimal versus realized policy rules in a regime-switching framework

In this paper we compare a deterministic model and a Markov switching model to analyze the behavior of the US economy and the Federal Reserve. We examine both optimal and empirical monetary policies for the US Federal Reserve between 1960 and 2008. We compare the optimal monetary policy to the actual interest rates and to the empirical reaction function. We also evaluate the sensitivity of the results to the preferences assigned to each objective. We find that there is no unique optimal solution that fits the Federal Reserve behavior over the entire period. The best fit to the actual interest rates is obtained by an optimal policy with preference switches following the rule: a high-volatility regime coincides with a priority on inflation alone while in a low-volatility regime there is equal policy priority on output stabilization and inflation.     

Why can an environmental policy tax promote growth through the channel of education?

This paper examines the implications of an environmental policy for growth performances. We develop a model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation. Firms invest in research to develop new technologies to reduce their pollution emissions and education is treated as product which not only enhances the productivity of individuals but also enters in their preferences. We find that a tighter environmental policy can promote growth. The reason is that a higher tax on pollution drives the prices of goods whose production is polluting up. This, in turn, enhances the willingness of individuals to acquire education.     

Democracy,inequality and the environment when citizens can mitigate health consequences of pollution privately or act collectively

We study the political economy of the environment in autocratic, weak and strong democracies when individuals can mitigate the health consequences of domestic pollution privately as well as control pollution collectively through public policies. We consider a small open economy with comparative advantage in dirty goods. With costly private mitigation, income inequality leads to an unequal distribution of the burdens of pollution (in accordance with the evidence). We show that the eco-friendliness ranking of political regime types varies with the cost of private mitigation and that increased inequality has non-monotonous effects on equilibrium pollution levels. In weak democracies, the political equilibrium may be characterized by low environmental standards but highly restricted trade, thus leading to ambiguous outcomes regarding pollution levels.     

Modelling Anti-inflationary Monetary Targeting in Romania

This paper characterises Romania's experience with anti-inflationary monetary targeting over the period 1999–2005 prior to the country's switch to inflation targeting. We uncover the National Bank of Romania's preferences, conditional on an estimated macro-model. We find that Romania's monetary targeting regime can be characterised by a concern for price stability and an additional role for smoothing of the central bank's instrument (base money growth). Exchange rate variability and output gap stability appear not to significantly enter the National Bank of Romania's objective function.     

Pollution effects on preferences: A unified approach

In this paper, we introduce a unified Ramsey model where pollution has an impact on preferences and affects both consumption demand and labor supply. Pollution comes from production activities and is viewed as a stock variable with a strong inertia. A government is introduced and levies a proportional tax on production to finance depollution expenditure. We find two interesting results when pollution raises the consumption demand (compensation effect). First, in the long run, a higher green‐tax rate increases the pollution level at the steady state (green paradox) when pollution raises the labor supply (disenchantment effect). Second, in the short run, local indeterminacy can arise through a Hopf bifurcation when pollution lowers the labor supply (leisure effect) even if pollution has a strong inertia.     

JOINT VENTURES, POLLUTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

We examine the impact of emission taxes on the pollution level in a duopoly framework with endogenous market structure. We demonstrate that an increase in emission taxes could trigger a regime switch from joint ventures to Cournot competition, causing the pollution level to increase. Such a phenomenon is likely to happen when the concerned industry is reasonably profitable, and the synergistic gain between joint venture partners is not too strong. Moreover, emission taxes can implement the first best outcome if and only if the industry is not too polluting. In case it is, the second best level of taxes may or may not equal the optimal tax under either joint venture or Cournot competition.     

Local environmental quality and life-satisfaction in Germany

Hitherto the task of valuing differences in environmental quality arising from air pollution and noise nuisance has been carried out mainly by using the hedonic price technique. This paper proposes a different approach to derive information on individual preferences for local environmental quality. It analyses data drawn from the German socio-economic panel in an attempt to explain differences in self-reported levels of well-being in terms of environmental quality. Mindful of existing research a large number of other explanatory variables are included to control for socio-demographic differences, economic circumstances as well as neighbourhood characteristics. Differences in local air quality and noise levels are measured by how much an individual feels affected by air pollution or noise exposure in their residential area. The evidence suggests that even when controlling for a range of other factors higher local air pollution and noise levels significantly diminish subjective well-being. But interestingly differences in perceived air and noise pollution are not capitalised into differences in house prices.     

Optimal Pollution Abatement Under ‘Sustainable’ and Other Social Time Preferences

This paper analyses optimal pollution abatement expenditure and the pricing of pollution under alternative social time preferences, including ‘sustainable’ preferences, defined as those that are consistent with two axioms of sustainable development introduced by Chichilnisky (Land Econ 73:467–491, 1997). These axioms state essentially that neither the welfare of present nor future generations ought to be favoured over the other in determining the socially optimal path of economic development. The method is to calibrate a modified Ramsey model of optimal global growth and saving, where pollution is generated by the global output of goods and services. Pollution in turn reduces output. The simulation results illustrate how sensitive the optimal pollution price and abatement expenditure can be over time to assumptions about the social time preference rate. They also show that ‘sustainable’ preferences impose a lower burden on future generations in terms of the pollution price and abatement expenditure. Hence there is a case for governments to make explicit their value judgments about intergenerational welfare, in the context of their notion of sustainable development, when setting target pollution abatement levels and pollution prices over time.     

Flypaper Unstuck: Comment on Dixon, Picton and Rimmer

Commonwealth general revenue grants to the States are substitutes for State taxes, and should be spent by the States. If preferences vary, then differences in State spending are not evidence of flypaper effects.     

Economic growth and the environment: Theory and facts

Several recent papers propose competing theoretical explanations for the empirical observation of an inverted U-shape relationship between environmental degradation and per-capita income. We propose the following test of the theory: calibrate a theoretical model to an already developed economy using information unrelated to the pollution–income curve. Then simulate the model starting from a less developed initial condition and compare the predicted pollution–income relationship with that in the data. Our results are mixed. Some support exists for the theory that the inverted U-shape results from a corner solution in which less developed countries do not abate pollution. However, because we find abatement is relatively inexpensive, the model predicts pollution peaks at a level of per capita income much lower than that observed in our U.S. data. For some pollutants, we find evidence of a structural break in preferences in the early 1970s. When the structural break is added, the model performs better for two of three pollutants.     

The Superiority of Environmental Federalism in the Presence of Lobbying and Prior Tax Distortions

It is generally believed that environmental federalism tends to generate greater pollution emissions than centralized policymaking. This paper demonstrates that the opposite can occur in the presence of lobbying. Although the decentralized regime gives rise to a tax‐interaction effect, which induces policymakers to set lax environmental policies, it may also reduce the political pressure on enlarging allowed emissions. If the latter outweighs the former, then the decentralized regime will generate less pollution than the centralized regime. Moreover, we also show that the decentralized regime can be more efficient than the centralized regime, which provides an alternative theoretical support for the superiority of environmental federalism.     

Fiscal and monetary effects on environmental quality,growth, and welfare

This paper examines the effect of fiscal and monetary policies on economic growth, inflation, environmental quality, and welfare. To this end, the horizontal-R&D growth model is extended to include pollution generated in the intermediate-goods production, and the demand for money through cash-in-advance (CIA) constraints on intermediate-goods production and R&D investment. Fiscal policy embodied in the taxation of pollution decreases output, profits, inflation, and wages in the intermediate-goods sector, reallocating labor to R&D that is the engine of economic growth. As it reduces pollution, it increases welfare if there are strong preferences for a clean environment. In turn, since the inflation rate is an increasing function of the nominal interest rate, the effects of changes in this monetary policy variable extend to the effects of changes in the inflation rate. An increase in the nominal interest rate penalizes employment, wages and output in the R&D sector relatively more if the respective CIA constraint is more demanding and thus economic growth decreases. As it also reduces pollution since decreases intermediate-goods production, it increases welfare if the preferences for a clean environment are strong enough.     

How long can excess pollution persist? The non-cooperative case

This paper describes a world composed of two (groups of) countries, which derive their utility from a polluting activity and from the enjoyment of a common environmental quality. The initial situation is both suboptimal and unsustainable: pollution leads to a continuous deterioration of environmental quality. The two countries have heterogeneous preferences for the environment, which are private knowledge. This prevents the adoption of abatement policies negotiated between the two countries, because each one has a strong incentive to announce in every negotiation an arbitrarily low preference for the environment. The two countries then engage in a war of attrition, each of them postponing abatement policies, in the hope that the other will concede first and abate more. We study for how long the adjustment is postponed, according to initial conditions, the greenness of the greenest country, the possible range of preferences and the rates of discount and natural regeneration.