Who Bears the Economic Costs of Environmental Regulations? by Don Fullerton, Erich Muehlegger
Abstract:
Public economics has a well-developed literature on tax incidence -
the ultimate burdens from tax policy. This literature is used here
to describe not only the distributional effects of environmental
taxes or subsidies but also the likely incidence of non-tax
regulations, energy efficiency standards, or other environmental
mandates. Recent papers find that mandates can be more regressive
than carbon taxes. We also describe how the distributional effects
of such policies can be altered by various market conditions such as
limited factor mobility, trade exposure, evasion, corruption, or
imperfect competition. Finally, we review data on carbon-intensity
of production and exports around the world in order to describe
implications for effects of possible carbon taxation on countries
with different levels of income per capita.
Complete working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
