Despite widespread agreement that a carbon tax would be more efficient, many countries
use fuel economy standards to reduce transportation-related carbon dioxide emissions. We …

The world has 1.4 billion passenger vehicles. How should governments regulate their air
pollution emissions? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead …

Policymakers are beginning to appreciate the efficiency properties of pollution taxes, but
concerns over equity remain. In this paper, we assess the distributional aspects of three …

An emissions tax is efficient, but measurement of every car's emissions would be inaccurate
and expensive. With identical consumers, we demonstrate the same efficiency for: an …

This paper considers the equity implications of vehicle emissions taxes by examining the
incidence of a tax on local pollutants. It uses emissions data from the California Air …

In Switzerland, the annual circulation taxes on road vehicles are set by and paid to the
cantons (not to the federal government). We exploit the 26 different circulation tax rules and …

Economists endorse taxes as a cost-effective means of reducing pollution. But policy makers
raise concerns about their regressivity, or disproportional burden on poorer families …

We use station-level price data and a significant diesel fuel carbon tax reform to study who
bears the economic burden of fuel carbon taxes. We use a difference-in-differences strategy …

ABSTRACT A basic tenet of economics posits that when consumers or firms don't face the
true social cost of their actions, market outcomes are inefficient. In the case of negative …

We review what is known about the economic efficiency of fuel taxes relative to efficiency
standards aimed at mitigating environmental externalities from cars. We present a simplified …