Optimal Tax Policy, Market Imperfections, and Environmental Externalities in a Dynamic Optimizing Macro Model

This paper develops a dynamic real business cycle model that highlights pollution externalities (on welfare and production) and market imperfections and uses it to determine the socially optimal tax policy that encompasses labor income, capital income, and emission taxes. We show that the optimal tax on capital and labor income only addresses the production inefficiency (and is time-invariant), while the tax on the environmental externalities affects both the production inefficiency and the environmental spillovers (and is time-varying). More interestingly, the socially optimal emission tax will be characterized by a Keynesian-like stabilizer that is designed to mitigate business cycle fluctuations, i.e., that will stimulate the economy with a lower emission tax during recessions. In a positive analysis, we show that the beneficial effects arising from pollution taxation will become larger the greater is the degree of the firms' monopoly power. In addition, a triple dividend in terms of improving environmental quality and increasing employment and firms' profit can be simultaneously realized if the environmental production externality is more significant and if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption is relatively small.     

EXTERNAL ECONOMIES OF SCALE AND OPTIMAL PLANT LOCATION: CORRECTION

This note shows that there is no interior solution in Mai and Hwang's oligopolistic location model with free entry when the sum of external economies scale and the degree of returns‐to‐scale is one or less than one. Furthermore, the shape of the demand function plays a key role in the determination of the oligopolistic firm's plant location.     

On Monetary Expansion, Terms of Trade and Economic Growth*

In a recent paper Roberts (1978) has extended Ramanathan's model (1975) to a two-sector, two-currency and two-country neoclassical growth model with flexible exchange rates. Under the assumption that the consumption good is relatively capital intensive, Roberts obtains two important propositions: an increase in domestic monetary expansion will increase the domestic overall capital intensity, decrease the foreign overall capital intensity, and worsen the terms of trade for the country importing the investment good; an increase in domestic monetary expansion may increase or decrease the level of trade. In this paper, we add to and generalize these results by using a simple yet thorough comparative statics analysis without the factor intensity condition.¹It will be seen that the complexity and ambiguity of Roberts' results are substantially reduced.     

STRATEGIC DEBT AND RJV COMPETITION: ERRATUM

The purpose of this note is to point out that there is a computing error made in the derivation of the t value in Chen (2005) . The erratum presents the correct expression of t and the ensuing changes in the results of Chen (2005) .