Taxes versus quotas in lobbying by a polluting industry with private information on abatement costs

We present a model of lobbying by a polluting industry with private information on pollution abatement costs and compare taxes with quotas under such conditions. We also examine the effect of private information on lobbying activity and social welfare under these two instruments. It is found that private information might improve social welfare under taxes when the government has little concern for social welfare, whereas private information does not improve social welfare under quotas. Quotas are generally socially preferred when the slope of marginal abatement costs is steeper than that of marginal damage or when the government does not concern itself with social welfare. However, private information reduces the comparative disadvantage of taxes compared to quotas when the government has little concern for social welfare. Finally, the results of numerical examples suggest that quotas are employed rather than taxes if the difference in natural emission levels between high- and low-cost industries is large.     

The effects of environmental taxes and quotas on the optimal timing of emission reductions under Choquet–Brownian uncertainty

The effects of two environmental policy options for the reduction of pollution emissions, i.e. taxes and non-tradable quotas, are analyzed. In contrast to the prior literature this work endogenously takes into account the level of emissions before and after the adoption of the new environmental policy. The level of emissions is determined by solving the firm's profit maximization problem under taxes and fixed quotas. We find that the optimal adoption threshold under taxes is always larger than the adoption threshold under fixed quota, even in a setting characterized by ecological uncertainty and ambiguity – in the form of Choquet–Brownian motions – on future costs and benefits over adopting environmental policies.     

Learning or lock-in: Optimal technology policies to support mitigation

We investigate conditions that amplify market failures in energy innovations, and suggest optimal policy instruments to address them. Using an intertemporal general equilibrium model we show that ‘small’ market imperfections may trigger a several decades lasting dominance of an incumbent energy technology over a dynamically more efficient competitor, given that the technologies are very good substitutes. Such a ‘lock-in’ into an inferior technology causes significantly higher welfare losses than market failure alone, notably under ambitious mitigation targets. More than other innovative industries, energy markets are prone to these lock-ins because electricity from different technologies is an almost perfect substitute. To guide government intervention, we compare welfare-maximizing technology policies including subsidies, quotas, and taxes with regard to their efficiency, effectivity, and robustness. Technology quotas and feed-in-tariffs turn out to be only insignificantly less efficient than first-best subsidies and seem to be more robust against small perturbations.     

Ecological dumping under foreign investment quotas

In this paper, we examine the discrimination of emission taxes between the export and nontradable sectors in a small open economy. A few articles indicate that there should be no differentiation of environmental policies between sectors in the economy if the government uses indirect instruments such as emission taxes. However, we show that discrimination of emission taxes may occur in an economy that imposes foreign investment quotas. In particular, the possibility that ecological dumping occurs is higher if export goods are more labor intensive than import goods (as in developing countries). Moreover, in the case where import goods are the most capital intensive, both emission tax rates may be lower than the marginal environmental damage, and ecological dumping may occur. It is also shown that easing foreign capital quotas may deteriorate the country’s welfare.     

Taxes versus quotas for a stock pollutant

We compare the effects of taxes and quotas for an environmental problem where the regulator and polluter have asymmetric information about abatement costs, and environmental damage depends on pollution stock. An increase in the slope of the marginal abatement cost curve, or a decrease in the slope of the marginal damage curve, favors taxes. An increase in the discount rate or the stock decay rate favors tax usage. Taxes dominate quotas if the length of a period during which decisions are constant is sufficiently small. An empirical illustration suggests that taxes dominate quotas for the control of greenhouse gasses.     

Government size and macroeconomic stability: A comment

We show that in a standard, technology shock-driven one-sector real business cycle model, the stabilization effects of government fiscal policy depend crucially on how labor hours enter the household's period utility function and the associated labor-market behavior. In particular, as Galí [European Economic Review 38 (1994), 117-132] has shown, when the household utility is logarithmic in both consumption and leisure, income taxes are destabilizing and government purchases are stabilizing. However, the results are reversed when preferences are instead convex in hours worked. That is, income taxes are now stabilizing and public spending is destabilizing. Furthermore, under both preference specifications, the magnitude of cyclical fluctuations in output remains unchanged when the income tax rate and the share of government purchases in GDP are equal (including laissez-faire).     

Strategic Environmental Policy under Free Trade with Transboundary Pollution

We analyze the effects of trade liberalization on environmental policies in a strategic setting when there is transboundary pollution. Trade liberalization can result in a race to the bottom in environmental taxes, which makes both countries worse off. This is not due to the terms of trade motive, but rather the incentive, in a strategic setting, to reduce the incidence of transboundary pollution. With command and control policies (emission quotas), countries are unable to influence foreign emissions by strategic choice of domestic policy; hence, there is no race to the bottom. However, with internationally tradable quotas, unless pollution is a pure global public bad, there is a race to the bottom in environmental policy. Under free trade, internationally nontradable quotas result in the lowest pollution level and strictly welfare‐dominate taxes. The ordering of internationally tradable quotas and pollution taxes depends, among other things, on the degree of international pollution spillovers.     

Trade Liberalization and Environmental Taxation in Federal Systems

The literature on trade liberalization and environment has not yet considered federal structures. In this paper, we show how the design of environmental policy in a federal system has implications for the effects of trade reform. Trade liberalization leads to a decline in pollution taxes, regardless of whether pollution taxes are set at the federal (centralized) or local (decentralized) level, and it increases social welfare. The effect under a decentralized system is smaller than if these taxes are set by the federal government, and pollution emissions therefore decline in this case. Moreover, majority bias interacts with trade liberalization if federal taxes are used.     

Partial cross-ownership and strategic environmental policy

This paper analyzes the effect of passive investment in rival firms on the setting of cooperative and non-cooperative environmental taxes. We consider two firms located in different countries, with each firm owning the same percentage of the stock of its rival. We show that bilateral partial cross-ownership affects the taxes set by the countries in the cooperative and non-cooperative cases. When the stake that one firm has in its rival is great enough and environmental spillovers are low enough, cooperative taxes are lower than non-cooperative taxes. For the remaining values of parameters the opposite result is obtained.     

The importance of considering optimal government policy when social norms matter for the private provision of public goods

We study optimal government policy in a reference model (Rege, 2004, Journal of Public Economic Theory, 6, 65–77) of public good provision and social approval in a dynamic setting. We show that even if complete adherence to the social norm maximizes social welfare it is by no means necessarily optimal to push society toward it. We stress the different roles of social externality and the public good problem. We discuss the problem with the standard crowding in and out argument and analyze the relationship with Pigouvian taxes. We discuss the role of the cost of public funds and show how it can create path dependency, the multiplicity of both optimal equilibria and optimal paths, and discuss the role of parameter instability.     

Volume and share quotas in Cournot competition

In this paper, we theoretically discuss volume and share quotas in the market where firms engage in Cournot competition. We show the equivalence among specific taxes, and volume quotas and share quotas with respect to equilibrium quantities. By using these results, we analyze comparative statics effects of volume and share quotas. Further, we apply the results to the examination of international oligopoly models with tariffs, import volume quotas, and import share quotas. Finally, we extend the model to endogenize the set of firms and derive a non-equivalence result of volume quotas and specific taxes.     

Externalities in a spatial context: The case of air pollution

In this paper air pollution externalities are analyzed in an explicit spatial setting that recognizes the spatial interdependence of polluters and their victims. Optimal environmental policies are shown to consist not only of Pigouvian taxes but of two other policies. First, regulations controlling the allocation of land between polluters and victims are needed. Secondly, if pollution taxes are imposed by local governments, in general it will be necessary for the federal government to take some of the tax proceeds and redistribute them amongst localities. For example, some of the proceeds in heavily taxed and polluted communities may have to be redistributed to lightly taxed and polluted communities.     

Environmental Taxes and First-Mover Advantages

This paper studies whether governments prefer to be leaders or followers in environmental policies. To analyze this question I assume transboundary pollution and two countries that have to decide whether to set environmental taxes sequentially or simultaneously. When taxes are set sequentially an effect, denoted as the sequential setting effect, arises that raises the equilibrium taxes. I show that whether governments prefer to be leaders or followers in taxes depends on the degree to which environmental pollution spills over to trading partners. When this overspill is low enough, taxes are strategic complements and both the leader and the follower obtain greater welfare than under a simultaneous tax setting. However, the leader country obtains greater welfare than the follower. In this case, governments set taxes sequentially. When the degree to which environmental pollution spills over to trading partners is high enough, taxes are strategic substitutes and governments set taxes simultaneously. In this case, each government wants to avoid becoming the follower in taxes.     

Environmental policy incentives to adopt advanced abatement technology:: Will the true ranking please stand up?

We investigate incentives through environmental policy instruments to adopt advanced abatement technology. First, we study the case where the regulator makes long-term commitments to policy levels and does not anticipate arrival of new technology. We show that taxes provide stronger incentives than permits, auctioned and free permits offer identical incentives, and standards may give stronger incentives than permits. Second, we investigate scenarios where the regulator anticipates new technologies. We show that with taxes and permits the regulator can induce first-best outcomes if he moves after firms have invested, whereas this does not always hold if he moves first.     

Vertical versus horizontal tax externalities: An empirical test

We study taxation externalities in federations of benevolent governments. Where different hierarchical government levels tax the same base, one can observe two types of externalities: a horizontal externality, working among governments of the same level and leading to tax rates that are too low compared to the social optimum; and a vertical externality, working between different levels of government and leading to suboptimally high tax rates. Building on the model of Keen and Kotsogiannis [Keen, Michael J., Kotsogiannis, Christos, 2002. Does federalism lead to excessively high taxes? American Economic Review 92 (1) 363–370], we derive a discriminating hypothesis to distinguish vertical and horizontal tax externalities based on measurable variables. This test is applied to a panel data set on local taxes in a sample of Swiss municipalities that feature direct-democratic fiscal decision making, so as to maximize the correspondence with the “benevolent” governments of the theory. We find that vertical externalities dominate – they are thus an observed empirical phenomenon as well as a notable extension to the theory of tax competition.     

Wage–Setting Institutions, Unemployment, and Voters' Demand for Redistribution Policy

This paper examines unemployment, wages, and voters' demand for redistribution policy under three different labour market structures: laissez–faire, wage–setting by company or industrial unions, and wage–setting by a central union. Decisions on the level of taxes and benefits are made by majority rule. Taxes, wages, and unemployment are lowest under competitive wage–setting and highest with decentralised unions. A higher degree of centralisation of union wage–setting implies lower unemployment and taxes because a fiscal externality is internalised. Under some conditions about the composition of the population, the political–economic equilibrium can further be improved upon by cooperation between the government and the central union. This seems to have happened in the Netherlands where the unions and the government agreed to cut taxes and restrain wages, which has led to the 'Dutch Miracle'.     

Domestic and international strategic interactions in environment policy formation

Summary. In this paper, we establish the most possilbe general formulation of the technology governing carbon-gas emission, giving rise to global external diseconomies, and ty to explore into the strategic interactions,both domestic and international, when an individual country decides on the environmental policies. Through the comparison among emission taxes, quotas, and standard in the perfectly competitive private economies, we find that the first two policies are equivalent but they are different in effects by virtue of what we may call the tax-exemption effect of emission standards. Such a difference in the policy effect further affects the other country's welfare through the global externalities, amplified through whether the government can precommit to either the emission tax or the emission standard. Received: January 16, 2001; revised version: April 16, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" The authors thank the valuable comments by an anonymous referee. Ministry of Education and Science for its financial support is also greatly acknowledged. Correspondence to:K. Kiyono     

Regulation of Stock Externalities with Correlated Abatement Costs

We study a dynamic regulation model where firms’ actions contribute to a stock externality. The regulator and firms have asymmetric information about serially correlated abatement costs. With price-based policies such as taxes, or if firms trade quotas efficiently, the regulator learns about the evolution of both the stock and costs. This ability to learn about costs is important in determining the ranking of taxes and quotas, and in determining the value of a feedback rather than an open-loop policy. For a range of parameter values commonly used in global warming studies, taxes dominate quotas, regardless of whether the regulator uses an open-loop or a feedback policy, and regardless of the extent of cost correlation.Early versions of this paper were presented at the Fifth California Workshop on Environmental and Resource Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, May 5–6, 2000, and at the annual meeting of the Canadian Agricultural Economics Society, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 1–3, 2000. We thank these conference participants, and two anonymous referees of this journal for their comments, without implicating them in any remaining errors. The opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of the Asian Development Bank.     

Comparison between specific taxation and volume quotas in a free entry Cournot oligopoly

We revisit the classic discussion of the comparison between tax and quota, but in a free-entry Cournot oligopoly. We investigate a quantity ceiling regulation as a quota policy. We find that tariff-quota equivalence holds if the firms are symmetric and the number of firms is given exogenously. However the equivalence does not hold and taxes dominate quotas in the free entry market because quota can increases the number of entering firms and increases the loss caused by excessive entries.