Environmental Taxation and Revenue for Development

environment, taxation, carbon tax, consumption

Burden Sharing in Climate Change Policy

Klimaveränderung, Internationale, Umweltpolitik, Welt, Climate change, International environmental policy, World

Atmospheric Externalities and Environmental Taxation.

The paper reviews the theory of environmental taxation under first best and second best conditions. It argues that negative environmental externalities lead to reductions of the provision of public goods, while investment in abatement increases the supply of public goods. Together with optimal tax rules, the paper therefore also derives conditions for the optimal use of resources on abatement. After brief discussions of the dimensions of time and uncertainty, tax reform and the double dividend, and taxes versus quotas, the optimal tax model is applied to the problem of global warming with a discussion of the particular incentive problems that arise in designing and implementing global climate policy.Environmental taxation; Public goods

Public Provision and Private Incentives

This paper surveys classical and modern arguments for public production and provision of goods. It reviews the conventional case for public production under conditions of increasing returns and discusses the modifications that have to be made if public production involves a cost inefficiency. It then discusses the causes behind a possible cost inefficiency, such as the difficulty of designing good incentive schemes in agencies with multiple and complex objectives. An alternative to designing better incentives in the public sector is that of contracting out to private firms, and the conditions favourable to this alternative are also discussed.

Bridging the Tax-Expenditure Gap: Green Taxes and the Marginal Cost of Funds

The marginal cost of public funds is usually seen as a number greater than one, reflecting the efficiency cost of distortionary taxes. But economic intuition suggests that since green taxes are efficiency-enhancing the MCF with such taxes will be less than one. The paper demonstrates that this intuition is not necessarily true, even when a green tax is the sole source of funds. The analysis also considers the MCF with a proportional income tax, given the presence of green taxes. It compares the optimization approach to the MCF with that of a balanced budget reform and shows that they lead to equivalent results.

Taxation and Tournaments

This paper analyzes the effects of progressive taxes on labour supply and income distribution in the context of the rank-order tournament model originally developed by Lazear and Rosen (1981). We show conditions under which a more progressive tax schedule will cause so large general equilibrium effects that the inequality in disposable income will actually increase. We also show that a non-zero redistributive tax is always optimal if society’s welfare function displays inequality aversion; this result always holds, regardless of behavioral responses and general equilibrium effects.TBA

Adam Smith and modern economics

In his Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith created an agenda for the study of the economy that is reflected in the structure of modern economics. This paper describes Smith’s contributions to four central areas of economic theory: The theory of price formation, the relationship between market outcomes and the public interest, the role of the state in the economy, and the sources of economic growth. In each case, an attempt is made to relate Smith’s contribution to the state of contemporary economics, showing both the similarities and contrasts between the respective approaches

Right to Restrict? A study of legitimacy as a driver of hard paternalistic interventions.

In this thesis, I study the effect of legitimacy on people’s willingness to implement a hard paternalistic intervention towards another person. In an incentivised experiment, participants decide whether to restrict the freedom of a stakeholder to prevent said stakeholder from making a mistake. I vary participants’ sense of legitimacy along two dimensions: whether they have been given positive feedback on their performance on a set of cognitive tasks (merit), and whether they have been assigned a leader role in relation to the stakeholder in question (leadership). I find that people become less willing to implement the hard paternalistic intervention after being assigned a leadership role. I do not find significant effects of receiving positive feedback on performance on people’s willingness to intervene. My results shed light on how paternalistic preferences may change depending on the degree of hierarchy in interpersonal relationships. Thus, they offer insights into paternalistic motivation in a wide range of hierarchical interpersonal relationships throughout society, such as those between employers and their employees, doctors and their patients, lawyers and their clients or parents and their children.nhhma

MEMS-gyromatriser

Denne masteroppgaven tar for seg bruk av gyromatriser for å forbedre nøyaktigheten til MEMS-gyroer. Det er utviklet en matematisk modell av vinkelhastighetsmålinger fra et enkelt gyroskop, og det er gjort forsøk på å få en høyere nøyaktighet ved å kombinere målinger fra flere gyroer. I gyromatrisene er støybidragene fra gyroene samlet og kombinert, og det er benyttet Kalmanfilter som filtrerer bort store deler av støyen. Flere scenarioer er simulert, blant annet med forskjellige antall gyroer, og tilfeller der det er korrelasjon mellom gyroene er sammenliknet med tilfeller der korrelasjon ikke er til stede. Resultatene viser at man kan oppnå store forbedringer ved å kombinere gyromålinger i gyromatriser. Både antall gyroer som ligger til grunn for målingene, samt om det er korrelasjon til stede eller ikke, viser seg å være blant de viktigste faktorene som spiller inn