the housing market impacts of shale gas development using data from pennsylvania and an array of empirical techniques to control for confounding factors we recover hedonic estimates of property value impacts from nearby shale gas development that vary with water source well productivity and visibility results indicate large negative impacts on nearby groundwater dependent homes while piped water dependent homes exhibit smaller positive impacts suggesting benefits from lease payments results have implications for the debate over regulation of shale gas development jel l71 q35 q53 r31 technological improvements in the extraction of oil and natural gas from unconventional sources have transformed communities and landscapes and brought debate and controversy in the policy arena shale gas plays underlying the populated northeastern united states were thought to be uneconomical less than ten years ago but now contribute a major share of us gas supply 1 natural gas has been hailed as a bridge to energy independence and a clean future because of its domestic sourcing and compared with coal and petroleum derivatives its smaller carbon footprint and reduced emissions of other pollutants e g particulates sulfur dioxide car

handling unobserved site characteristics in random utility models of recreation demand abstract this paper presents a new random utility model of recreation demand that addresses the unobserved characteristics of recreation sites most random utility recreation demand models implicitly assume that all relevant site characteristics are observed by the researcher or allow for the possibility of unobserved characteristics in a restrictive manner unlike traditional approaches the proposed model avoids the bias unobserved site characteristics can cause in welfare estimates and the travel cost parameter monte carlo simulations motivate the proposed model by showing that it provides more efficient parameter estimates in contrast existing methods yield less efficient estimates and biased standard errors that overstate precision an empirical application to recreational fishing in wisconsin illustrates the potential importance of this modeling innovation in this application controlling for unobserved characteristics is important for a range of model specifications

special tax regimes and the choice of organizational form evidence from the european tonnage taxes abstract tax systems often discriminate among the various organizational forms of doing business and may therefore affect the choice of organizational form this paper studies how special tax regimes shape the organizational form choice although the full effects depend on the way that firm level special tax regimes are designed special regimes generally tend to favor pass through firms over non pass through firms the tonnage tax a tax incentive for international shipping firms available in many countries worldwide is examined to understand these effects employing european firm and country level data the impact of the tonnage tax on organizational form choice is studied empirically the results are consistent with the theoretical model shipping firms are less likely to incorporate if the tonnage tax is also available for firms that have adopted pass through organizational forms

environmental accounting for pollution in the united states economy this study presents a framework to include environmental externali ties into a system of national accounts the paper estimates the air pollution damages for each industry in the united states an inte grated assessment model quantifies the marginal damages of air pol lution emissions for the us which are multiplied times the quantity of emissions by industry to compute gross damages solid waste com bustion sewage treatment stone quarrying marinas and oil and coal fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added the largest industrial contributor to external costs is coal fired electric generation whose damages range from 0 8 to 5 6 times value added jel e01 l94 q53 q56

could a monetary base rule have prevented the great depression abstract this paper continues an ongoing investigation of the properties of a policy rule that specifies settings of the monetary base that are designed to keep nominal gnp growing smoothly at a noninflationary rate counterfactual historical simulations for 1923 1941 are conducted with the rule and a small model of nominal gnp determination estimated with u s quarterly data with residuals fed in as estimates of the behavioral shocks that occurred the simulation results indicate that nominal gnp would have been kept reasonably close to a steady three percent path over 1923 1941 if the rule had been in effect

economic policy and the great depression in a small open economy we use a standard new keynesian model of a small open economy extended to include a government sector to investigate the great depression in australia a calibrated model with a fixed exchange rate regime similar to the gold standard does well in replicating the dynamics of output during the interwar period we then ask to what extent shocks to the economy would have been moderated by adopting modern day policies we find that if policymakers had adopted a flexible exchange rate with a taylor rule policy that output fluctuations during the great depression would have been moderated by up to 25 changes in government fiscal policy would also have moderated output fluctuations but by a slightly smaller amount overall we find that improved policy could have reduced output fluctuations by almost 50

political internalization of economic externalities and environmental policy abstract this paper derives the characteristics of endogenous environmental policy in a common agency model of politics and proceeds to show that competition between lobby groups is an important source of internalization of economic externalities our analysis generalizes bhagwati s principle of targeting to the case of distorted political markets moreover we show that the politically optimal structure of environmental taxes incorporates a pigouvian adjustment however since lobby groups care about the distribution of income as well as about efficiency the equilibrium structure of taxes differs considerably from the pigouvian rule

monetary policy and exchange rate volatility in a small open economy we lay out a small open economy version of the calvo sticky price model and show how the equilibrium dynamics can be reduced to a simple representation in domestic inflation and the output gap we use the resulting framework to analyse the macroeconomic implications of three alternative rulebased policy regimes for the small open economy domestic inflation and cpi based taylor rules and an exchange rate peg we show that a key difference among these regimes lies in the relative amount of exchange rate volatility that they entail we also discuss a special case for which domestic inflation targeting constitutes the optimal policy and where a simple second order approximation to the utility of the representative consumer can be derived and used to evaluate the welfare losses associated with the suboptimal rules

the impact of the corporate income tax evidence from state organizational form data abstract by taxing the income of corporate firms at a different rate than non corporate firms taxes can play an important role in a firm s choice of organizational form the sensitivity of the organizational form decision to tax rates provides a key indicator of the distortion created by the corporate income tax this paper uses new cross sectional data on organizational form choices across states compiled in the census of retail trade to estimate this sensitivity the results document a significant impact of the relative taxation of corporate to personal income on the share of real economic activity that is done by corporations and that the impact is many times larger than has been found in the previous empirical literature based on time series data the results show little impact however on the actual operations of firms such as their labor intensity wages and the like they do indicate that firms are able to exploit the progressivity of the corporate income tax system by dividing into numerous firms

what are cities worth land rents local productivity and the total value of amenities abstract this paper models how to use widely available data on wages and housing costs to infer land rents local productivity and the total value of local amenities in the presence of federal taxes and locally produced nontraded goods i apply the model to u s metropolitan areas with the aid of visually intuitive graphs the results improve measures of productivity and feature large differences in land rents wage and housing cost differences across metropolitan areas are accounted for more by productivity than quality of life differences regressions using individual amenities reveal that the most productive and valuable cities are typically coastal sunny mild educated and large

who participates in tax avoidance evidence from swedish microdata abstractthis article empirically examines why not all individuals participate in tax avoidance we use rich swedish administrative panel data on all taxpayers with a link between corporate and individual tax returns and document that few individuals utilize legal and observable tax avoidance opportunities our results show that there are several frictions in tax avoidance participation in addition to monetary benefits from tax avoidance incentives the opportunity to participate in tax avoidance access as well as information and knowledge about these opportunities awareness are important factors for the individual s tax avoidance decision we further show that tax avoidance spreads within communities the impact of the local network is stronger for non commuters who live and work in the same municipality

urban decline and durable housing urban decline is not the mirror image of growth and durable housing is the primary reason the nature of decline is so different this paper presents a model of urban decline with durable housing and verifies these implications of the model 1 city growth rates are skewed so that cities grow more quickly than they decline 2 urban decline is highly persistent 3 positive shocks increase population more than they increase housing prices 4 negative shocks decrease housing prices more than they decrease population 5 if housing prices are below construction costs then the city declines and 6 the combination of cheap housing and weak labor demand attracts individuals with low levels of human capital to declining cities

the flypaper effect what happens to a state s spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government the standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes or roughly 5 10 percent for most states in contrast numerous empirical analyses have found that spending increases by much more with some estimates near 100 percent this result is known as the flypaper effect since the money appears to stick where it hits the authors review this evidence as well as other studies that find similar behavior in firms

real wage rigidities and the new keynesian model most central banks perceive a trade off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing the gap between output and desired output however the standard new keynesian framework implies no such trade off in that framework stabilizing inflation is equivalent to stabilizing the welfare relevant output gap in this paper we argue that this property of the new keynesian framework which we call the divine coincidence is due to a special feature of the model the absence of nontrivial real imperfections we focus on one such real imperfection namely real wage rigidities when the baseline new keynesian model is extended to allow for real wage rigidities the divine coincidence disappears and central banks indeed face a trade off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing the welfare relevant output gap we show that not only does the extended model have more realistic normative implications but it also has appealing positive properties in particular it provides a natural interpretation for the dynamic inflation unemployment relation found in the data

great expectations and the end of the depression what ended the great depression in the united states this paper suggests that the recovery was driven by a shift in expectations this shift was triggered by president franklin delano roosevelt s fdr policy actions on the monetary policy side roosevelt abolished the gold standard and announced an explicit policy objective of inflating the price level to pre depression levels on the fiscal policy side roosevelt expanded real and deficit spending which helped make his policy objective credible the key to the recovery was the successful management of expecta tions about future policy roosevelt s rise to power is modeled as a policy regime change as in thomas sargent 1983 and peter temin and barry wigmore 1990 this paper formalizes temin and wigmore s argu ment in a repeated game setting using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model and argues that the regime change can account for the recovery in the model a regime change means the elimination of certain policy dogmas that constrain the actions of the government the regime change generates an endogenous shift in expectations due to a coordination of mon etary and fiscal policy this coordination ended the great depression by engineering a shift in expectations from contractionary i e the private sector expected future economic contrac tion and deflation to expansionary i e the public expected future economic expansion and inflation the expectation of higher future inflation lowered real interest rates thus stimulating demand while the expectation of higher future income stimulated demand by raising permanent income

consequences of the clean water act and the demand for water quality since the 1972 u s clean water act government and industry have invested over 1 trillion to abate water pollution or 100 per person year over half of u s stream and river miles however still violate pollution standards we use the most comprehensive set of files ever compiled on water pollution and its determinants including 50 million pollution readings from 240 000 monitoring sites and a network model of all u s rivers to study water pollution s trends causes and welfare consequences we have three main findings first water pollution concentrations have fallen substantially between 1972 and 2001 for example the share of waters safe for fishing grew by 12 percentage points second the clean water act s grants to municipal wastewater treatment plants which account for 650 billion in expenditure caused some of these declines through these grants it cost around 1 5 million 2014 dollars to make one river mile fishable for a year we find little displacement of municipal expenditure due to a federal grant third the grants estimated effects on housing values are smaller than the grants costs we carefully discuss welfare implications

panel data analysis of regulatory factors shaping environmental performance this is the publisher s version also available electronically from http www mitpressjournals org doi abs 10 1162 003465304323023895 u1q6giuvdgi

taxes organizational form and the deadweight loss of the corporate income tax abstract by changing the relative gain to incorporation corporate taxation can play an important role in a firm s choice of organizational form general equilibrium models have shown that substantial shifting of organizational form in response to tax rates implies a large deadweight loss of taxation this paper estimates the impact of taxes on organizational form using data from 1900 1939 the results indicate that the effect of taxes is significant but small a corporate rate increase of 0 10 raises the non corporate share of capital 0 002 0 03 the implied deadweight loss of the corporate income tax is around 5 10 of revenue

monetary policy for an open economy an alternative framework with optimizing agents and sticky prices the new open economy macroeconomics seeks to provide an improved basis for monetary and exchange rate policy through the construction of open economy models that feature rational expectations optimizing agents and slowly adjusting prices of goods this paper promotes an alternative approach for constructing such models by treating imports not as finished consumer goods but rather as raw material inputs to the home economy s productive process this treatment leads to a clean and simple theoretical structure that has some empirical attractions as well a particular small economy model is calibrated and its properties exhibited primarily by means of impulse response functions the preferred variant is shown to feature a pattern of correlations between exchange rate changes and inflation that is more realistic than provided by a more standard specification important recent events are interpreted in light of the alternative models

the derivation of discount rates with an augmented measure of income abstract most developed economies invest in public goods such as national defense education infrastructure and the environment discount rates used to evaluate such projects should reflect the rate of return on the current mix of investment opportunities rates derived from the productivity of private capital neglect returns beyond the market boundary the present paper derives discount rates using an augmented measure of national income inclusive of non market goods in an empirical application focusing on air pollution and climate damages in the united states economy the paper reports that the difference between augmented and market discount rates averages 0 3 percentage points from 1999 to 2014

international spillovers and water quality in rivers do countries free ride transboundary spillovers may degrade environmental quality if countries free ride this paper examines the extent of such degradation in water quality in international rivers using data from river monitoring stations in the un s global emissions monitoring system gems it compares pollution levels in international and domestic rivers the results suggest that free riding may substantially increase pollution in international rivers but the estimates are sensitive to the inclusion of country effects this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

are changes of organizational form costly income shifting and business entry responses to taxes abstract drawing on administrative panel data covering the full population of business owners in the uk i study the effects of differential tax liabilities across organizational forms on business entry and on income shifting i find that a 10 increase in savings from incorporation leads to a 1 7 increase in the number of new business owners however higher entrepreneurial entry is offset by income shifting increasing the hazard rate of incorporation of the existing self employed by up to 2 3 for a 10 increase in tax savings i show that despite large tax savings from incorporation exceeding 10 pp in some years a substantial proportion of business owners fail to incorporate suggesting that income shifting through incorporation is not the primary avoidance channel for the self employed

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

why is pollution from u s manufacturing declining the roles of environmental regulation productivity and trade between 1990 and 2008 air pollution emissions from u s manufacturing fell by 60 percent despite a substantial increase in manufacturing output we show that these emissions reductions are primarily driven by within product changes in emissions intensity rather than changes in output or in the composition of products produced we then develop and estimate a quantitative model linking trade with the environment to better understand the economic forces driving these changes our estimates suggest that the implicit pollution tax that manufacturers face doubled between 1990 and 2008 these changes in environmental regulation rather than changes in productivity and trade account for most of the emissions reductions

five facts about prices a reevaluation of menu cost models are price decreases 3 the frequency of price increases covaries strongly with inflation whereas the frequency of price decreases and the size of price increases and price decreases do not 4 the frequency of price change is highly seasonal it is highest in the first quarter and then declines 5 we find no evidence of upwardsloping hazard functions of price changes for individual products we show that the first second and third facts are consistent with a benchmark menu cost model whereas the fourth and fifth facts are not

dynamics of the trade balance and the terms of trade the j curve the authors provide a theoretical interpretation of two features of international data the countercyclical movements in net exports and the tendency for the trade balance to be negatively correlated with current and future movements in terms of trade but positively correlated with past movements they document the same properties in a two country stochastic growth model in which trade fluctuations reflect in large part the dynamics of capital formation the authors find that their general equilibrium perspective is essential the relation between the trade balance and the terms of trade depends critically on the source of fluctuations copyright 1994 by american economic association

tax distortions to the choice of organizational form income from corporate and noncorporate firms is treated very differently under the tax law in theory given existing tax law the noncorporate sector should consist of very profitable firms owned by low tax bracket investors and firms with tax losses owned by high tax bracket investors but the degree to which firms change their form of organization in response to taxes and the resulting excess burden depends as well on nontax factors given the role of taxes we estimate what size the nontax advantage to incorporating must take in each industry so that the forecasted choices for organizational form aggregated over investors in different tax brackets are consistent with the aggregate evidence while the estimated nontax costs are large in some industries noncorporate activity tends to be concentrated where the costs are small leading to little excess burden from the tax distortion to organizational form

from microlevel decisions to landscape changes an assessment of agricultural conservation policies the growth in conservation programs has created a need for modeling frameworks capable of measuring microlevel behavioral responses and macrolevel landscape changes this paper presents an empirical model that predicts farmers production practices and the resulting levels of agricultural runoffs at more than 42 000 agricultural sites in the upper mississippi river basin under alternative conservation policies results suggest that payments for conservation tillage and crop rotations increase the use of these conservation practices however the acreage response is inelastic and the programs are not likely to be cost effective on their own for addressing hypoxia problem in the gulf of mexico

the corporation as a tax shelter evidence from recent israeli tax changes abstract shifting of income between the corporate and the personal income tax bases in response to tax incentives is the premise of the literature on taxation and organizational form empirical evidence of income shifting is however merely circumstantial using a unique panel of high frequency vat data from israel we trace the footprints of income shifting through incorporation by high income individuals who convert their labor income into less taxed dividends a rise in the personal income tax rates resulted in more than 4500 companies a 5 addition to the corporate sector being registered in the 12 months following the tax change mainly by self employed professionals in the industries of business activities and health services behavioral response to taxation was found only in the top percentile of the income distribution

did sunspot forces cause the great depression abstract we apply a dynamic general equilibrium model to the period of the u s great depression in particular we examine a modification of the real business cycle model in which the possibility of indeterminacy of equilibria arises in other words agents self fulfilling expectations can serve as a primary impulse behind fluctuations we find that the model driven only by these measured sunspot shocks can explain well the entire depression era that is the decline from 1929 to 1932 the subsequent slow recovery and the recession that occurred in 1937 1938

decentralization and pollution spillovers evidence from the re drawing of county borders in brazil decentralization can improve service delivery but it can also generate externalities across jurisdictional boundaries we examine the nature and size of water pollution externalities as rivers flow across jurisdictions panel data on water pollution in brazilian rivers coupled with county splits that change the locations of borders allow us to identify the spatial patterns of pollution as rivers approach and cross borders controlling for fixed effects and trends specific to each location the theory of externalities predicts that pollution should increase at an increasing rate as the river approaches the downstream exit border that there should be a structural break in the slope of the pollution function at the border and that a larger number of managing jurisdictions should exacerbate pollution externalities we find support for all four predictions in the data satellite data on growth in night time lights along rivers show that local authorities allow more settlements to develop close to rivers in the downstream portions of counties which is the likely underlying mechanism the border effects on pollution are not as pronounced when the cost of inter jurisdictional coordination is lower

evaluating public programs with close substitutes the case of head start this paper empirically evaluates the cost effectiveness of head start the largest early childhood education program in the united states using data from the randomized head start impact study hsis we show that head start draws a substantial share of its participants from competing preschool programs that receive public funds this both attenuates measured experimental impacts on test scores and reduces the program s net social costs a cost benefit analysis demonstrates that accounting for the public savings associated with reduced enrollment in other subsidized preschools can reverse negative assessments of the program s social rate of return estimates from a semi parametric selection model indicate that head start is about as effective at raising test scores as competing preschools and that its impacts are greater on children from families unlikely to participate in the program efforts to expand head start to new populations are therefore likely to boost the program s social rate of return provided that the proposed technology for increasing enrollment is not too costly

business incomes at the top business income constitutes a large and increasing share of income and wealth at the top of the distribution we discuss how tax policy treats and shapes how businesses are organized and how they distribute economic gains to owners with the focus on closely held and pass through firms these considerations influence whether and how labor and capital income is observed in economic data and feed into research controversies regarding the measurement of inequality and the progressivity of the tax code we discuss the importance of these issues in the us and highlight that limited evidence from other countries suggests that they are likely to be important elsewhere

when subsidies for pollution abatement increase total emissions in a first best deterministic world it is well known 2 28 30 that a unit tax on emissions equal to marginal damage is an efficient mechanism for internalizing the damages caused by polluting firms a unit subsidy for emissions abated also equal to marginal pollution damage has the same desirable property but only in the short run in the long run such subsidies induce polluting firms to operate at too small a scale and attract an excessive number of new firms to the polluting industry this can have the perverse result that there are more emissions when abatement is subsidized than when it is not nevertheless economists have been reluctant to give up entirely on the subsidy approach recognizing with oates 23 290 that polluters will obviously be far more receptive to measures that assist with the costs of pollution control than to those that place the burden upon themselves it is therefore not surprising that economists have continued to look for and find new justifications for subsidizing pollution control thus mestelman 20 187 argues that the subsidy scheme may be a second best alternative for externality control when the direct taxation alternative is not politically viable mchugh 17 64 shows that subsidies for pollution abatement expenditures can be a useful instrument in the case of cost increasing technological innovations harford 6 demonstrates that subsidies for pollution control inputs may be efficient when enforcement is sufficiently costly harford 7 makes still another argument for subsidies in the case in which the day to day performance of abatement equipment is uncertain but the uncertainty can be reduced by maintenance expenditures finally there are schemes for combining subsidies and taxes 14 26 given the continuing interest in subsidies it is important to examine carefully the disturbing case in which subsidies increase rather than decrease total emissions

tax avoidance and the deadweight loss of the income tax traditional analyses of the income tax greatly underestimate deadweight losses by ignoring its effect on forms of compensation and patterns of consumption the full deadweight loss is easily calculated using the compensated elasticity of taxable income to changes in tax rates because leisure excludable income and deductible consumption are a hicksian composite good microeconomic estimates imply a deadweight loss of as much as 30 of revenue or more than ten times harberger s classic 1964 estimate the relative deadweight loss caused by increasing existing tax rates is substantially greater and may exceed 2 per 1 of revenue

unlocking amenities estimating public good complementarity abstract public goods may exhibit complementarities that are essential for determining their individual value our results indicate that improving safety near parks can turn them from public bads to goods ignoring complementarities may lead to i undervaluing the potential value of public goods ii overestimating heterogeneity in preferences and iii understating the value of public goods to minority households recent reductions in crime have unlocked almost 7 billion in property value in chicago new york and philadelphia still two fifths of the potential value of park proximity 10 billion remains locked in

evidence of the effects of water quality on residential land prices we use hedonic techniques to show that water quality has a significant effect on property values along the chesapeake bay we calculate the potential benefits from an illustrative but limited water quality improvement and we calculate an upper bound to the benefits from a more widespread improvement many environmental hedonic studies have almost entirely ignored the potential for omitted variables bias the possibility that pollution sources in addition to emitting undesirable substances are likely to be unpleasant neighbors we discuss the implications of this oversight and we provide an application that addresses this potential problem o 2000 acadcmic prcss

monetary policy in a low pass through environment in a dynamic new keynesian optimizing model we introduce incomplete exchange rate pass through on import prices three results stand out first unlike canonical models with perfect pass through which emphasize a type of isomorphism incomplete pass through renders the analysis of monetary policy of an open economy fundamentally different from the one of a closed economy second productivity driven deviations from the law of one price assume the interpretation of endogenous cost push shocks third the optimal commitment policy relative to discretion entails a smoothing of the deviations from the law of one price and requires more stable nominal and real exchange rates

efficient pollution regulation getting the prices right this paper argues for efficient environmental regulations that equate the mar ginal damage of pollution to marginal abatement costs across space the paper estimates the source specific marginal damages of air pollution and calculates the welfare gain from making the current sulfur dioxide allowance trading pro gram for power plants more efficient the savings from using trading ratios based on marginal damages are between 310 and 940 million per year the potential savings from setting aggregate emissions efficiently and from includ ing more sources of air pollution are many times higher jel h23 q53 q58

how much do taxes discourage incorporation the double taxation of corporate income should discourage firms from incorporating we investigate the extent to which the aggregate allocation of assets and taxable income in the united states between corporate and noncorporate firms responds to the size of this tax distortion during the period 1959 1986 in theory profitable firms should shift out of the corporate sector when the tax distortion is large and conversely for firms with tax losses our empirical results provide strong support for these forecasts and imply that the resulting excess burden equals 16 percent of business tax revenue one of the most basic distortions created by the double taxation of corporate income in the united states is the disincentive to incorporate even in most countries with integrated or partially integrated tax systems there are differential taxes across organizational forms however obvious this distortion may be most articles investigating the distortions created by the corporate tax have taken as exogenous a firm s choice whether or not to incorporate assuming for example that some industries are inherently corporate while others are inherently noncorporate a variety of nontax factors described below can certainly influence a firm s choice of organizational form causing some to favor incorporating and others not but are these nontax factors so dominant that taxes do not in practice influence a firm s choice of organizational form as gravelle and kotlikoff 1989 1993 emphasize tax induced changes in firms choices of organizational form in principle can create large excess burdens the size of these excess burdens in practice depends on the extent to which firms respond to these tax incentives in this article we calculate how the tax distortion discouraging firms from incorporating has varied over time then estimate the extent to which the allocation of assets and taxable income between corporate and noncorporate

tax evasion under differential taxation the economics of income source misreporting abstract if different income sources are subject to different rates of taxation a taxpayer may find it worthwhile to evade taxes by declaring part of his higher taxed income as stemming from a lower taxed source this paper inquires into the determinants of income source misreporting focusing on the relationships between misreporting and taxation under alternative penalty schemes allowing the taxpayer the choice between source misreporting and pure underreporting the paper examines also the relative amount of tax escaping the tax collector through the alternative forms of evasion and determines the conditions under which one will be preferred to the other

contingent valuation from dubious to hopeless abstract approximately 20 years ago peter diamond and i wrote an article for this journal analyzing contingent valuation methods at that time peter s view was that contingent valuation was hopele

ex post evaluation of an earmarked tax on air pollution in this paper we do an ex post evaluation of the french tax on air pollution the revenues of this tax were redistributed to polluters in the form of subsidies to abatement technologies and the policy is a typical example of an earmarked tax we use a two stage estimation procedure on an unbalanced panel data set of 226 plants from three industrial sectors that are some of the main contributors to nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions the results indicate that the overall environmental effectiveness of this particular tax subsidy scheme can be questioned

the effectiveness of incomplete and overlapping pollution regulation evidence from bans on phosphate in automatic dishwasher detergent abstract this paper examines the effectiveness of command and control policies in the presence of incomplete and overlapping regulations we study how recent bans on phosphate in household dishwasher detergent affect pollution loads to waterways costs at wastewater treatment facilities and consumer behavior we show that the effectiveness of the bans in reducing effluent depends critically on regulations at receiving treatment facilities as cost minimizers facilities with an emissions standard on phosphorus face no incentive to deviate from the standard we show that bans have weak effects on effluent especially in the most polluted waterways we also use an early isolated ban in spokane washington to study the effect of the bans on consumers we find that this ban shifted approximately 40 of dishwasher detergent sales from spokane to bordering counties until a state wide ban was implemented using these estimates we find that the welfare loss to consumers from recent bans is likely greater than the cost savings to treatment plants