Pigouvian Taxation in a Ramsey World

This paper studies the optimal Pigouvian tax for correcting pollution when the government also uses distortionary taxes to raise revenues. When preferences are quasilinear in leisure and additive, the Pigovian tax can be separated from the Ramsey revenue-raising tax. We characterize the relationship between the Pigouvian tax and marginal social damages in a variety of circumstances. In a setting with homogeneous households, the Pigouvian tax exceeds marginal damages if goods have inelastic demands, and vice versa. When households are heterogeneous so taxes can be redistributive, the Pigouvian tax gives more weight to damages suffered by low-income persons. The analysis is extended to allow for costly abatement. In general corrective taxes have to be applied to both emissions and output of the polluting good

The impact of inflation risk on forward trading and production

This paper examines the behavior of a competitive firm that faces joint price and inflation risk. Given that the price risk is negatively correlated with the inflation risk in the sense of expectation dependence, we show that the firm optimally opts for an over-hedge (under-hedge) if the firm’s coefficient of relative risk aversion is everywhere no greater (no smaller) than unity. We show further that banning the firm from forward trading may induce the firm to produce more or less, depending on whether the price risk premium is positive or negative, respectively. While the price risk premium is unambiguously negative in the absence of the inflation risk, it is not the case when the inflation risk prevails. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, forward hedging needs not always promote production should firms take inflation seriously.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A model of homogeneous input demand under price uncertainty

This paper examines the empirical validity of a model of homogeneous input demand under price uncertainty in which firms trade off expected input cost against its variability (risk) in selecting the optimal input supplier mix. Using recent work in time-series econometrics, this model is applied to the Japanese steam-coal import market, where five suppliers compete: China, the Soviet Union, South Africa, the United States, and Australia. (JEL L10, L72) The purpose of this paper is to derive and examine the empirical validity of a model of homogeneous input demand under price uncertainty. The motivation for this investigation is the common observation that firms simultaneously purchase a homogeneous factor of production from a variety of suppliers each charging a different price. Moreover, there are many instances when the price from one supplier is consistently above that of all other suppliers for an extended period of time yet firms continue to purchase from this supplier. This observation appears to violate the criterion of expected cost minimization for input choice.1 An attempt to explain these anomalies suggests that firms trade off the level of expected input cost against its variability in deciding how to allocate total input demand across available suppliers. By purchasing inputs from a variety of suppliers, the firm is diversifying away some of the price risk associated with satisfying demand from the single least-expected-cost supplier.2 Although the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) between risk and cost is not directly observable, we develop a methodology for empirically estimating this magnitude from a time-series of input purchases. This MRS is an estimate of the firm's risk preferences at the expected cost-risk pair selected. If we assume that this MRS between risk and cost is constant across all expected cost-risk pairs, then an input-price risk premium can be calculated. Subject to this assumption, the input-price risk premium is the percentage above the current * Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, and Department of Economics and Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, respectively. We thank seminar participants at Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Texas, the University of Washington, Purdue University, and the Norwegian School of Economics for comments on earlier drafts. Tom MaCurdy, Randy Mariger, Paul Newbold, Roger Noll, and Agnar Sandmo deserve special mention for their helpful comments. Vivian Hamilton expertly prepared the figures. We especially thank an anonymous referee for thoughtful comments and suggestions on the previous version of the paper. His many contributions are too numerous to mention individually. The final version of this paper was prepared while Wolak was a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution. IFor the sake of simplicity, assume that the price series are independent and identically distributed draws from a multivariate distribution. The null hypothesis of equal means for the prices becomes less likely the greater the number of observations that one price series remains above the others. Clearly, if firms are minimizing expected cost, they would purchase all of this input from the least-expected-price supplier. Hence, in this simple case, the nonzero market share of the consistently high-priced supplier is, with high probability, a violation of the expected-cost-minimization criterion of input choice. 51

Valuing Potential Groundwater Protection Benefits

This paper explores the implications of endogenous risk for the economic value of preventing groundwater contamination. We consider the analytical implications of endogenous risk for five key building blocks frequently used to structure studies of groundwater valuation: The probability and the location of contamination, the exposed population, risk perceptions, and Intertemporal issues

Small farmers, NGOs, and a Walmart World: Welfare effects of supermarkets operating in Nicaragua

Despite more than a decade of NGO and government activities promoting developing world farmer participation in high-value agricultural markets, evidence regarding the household welfare effects of such initiatives is limited. This paper analyzes the geographic placement of supermarket supply chains in Nicaragua between 2000 and 2008 and uses a difference-in-difference specification on measures of supplier and non-supplier assets to estimate the welfare effects of small farmer participation. Though results indicate that selling to supermarkets increases household productive asset holdings, they also suggest that only farmers with advantageous endowments of geography and water are likely to participate

Taxing Education in Ramsey’s Tradition

Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, it is shown to be second-best efficient to deviate from Ramsey's Rule and to distort qualified labour less than nonqualified labour. The result holds for arbitrary utility and learning functions. Efficient incentives for education and saving are analysed under conditions of second and third best. It is argued that efficient tax policy should care more about incentives for education than for saving

Optimum Tariffs and Exhaustible Resources: Theory and Evidence for Gasoline

Domestic consumption taxes on oil products largely differ across countries, ranging from very high subsidies to very high taxes. The empirical literature on the issue has highlighted the role of revenue-raising (Ramsey commodity taxation) and externalitycorrection (Pigovian taxation) motives for national taxation. Isolatedly, the theoretical literature on non-renewable-resource taxation has emphasized the role of the optimumtariff dimension of excise taxes which reflects countries’ non-cooperative exercise of their market power. This paper reconciles these two strands by comprehensively addressing the issue. First, we propose a multi-country model of national taxation with oil – modeled as a polluting exhaustible resource – and some regular commodities. Domestic welfare is maximized with respect to domestic taxes under a revenue-collection constraint. The optimal domestic tax on oil consumption not only consists of a Ramsey inverse-elasticity term and of a Pigovian term, but also of an optimum-tariff component. In fact, resource exhaustibility implies a form of supply inelasticity that magnifies optimum-tariff arguments. Second, based on a multiple regression using a data set with a large number of countries, we test the power of the optimum-tariff tax component in explaining national gasoline taxes. We find strong evidence that this component plays a crucial role in countries’ taxation of gasoline