Search

We estimate how the mortality effects of temperature vary across U.S. climate regions to assess local and national damages from projected climate change. Using 22 years of Medicare data, we find that both cold and hot days increase mortality. However, hot days are less deadly in warm places while cold days are less deadly in cool places. Incorporating this heterogeneity into end-of-century climate change assessments reverses the conventional wisdom on climate damage incidence: cold places bear more, not less, of the mortality burden. Allowing places to adapt to their future climate substantially reduces the estimated mortality effects of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When consumers exhibit present bias, the standard solution to market failures caused by externalities—Pigouvian pricing—is suboptimal. I investigate policies aimed at externalities for present-biased consumers. Optimal policy includes an instrument to correct the externality and an instrument to correct the present bias. Either instrument can be an incentive-based policy (e.g. a tax on fuel economy) or a command-and-control policy (e.g. a fuel economy mandate). Under consumer heterogeneity, a command-and-control policy may dominate an incentive-based policy. Calibrated to the US automobile market, simulation results suggest that the second-best gasoline tax is 3–30% higher than marginal external damages. The optimal price policy includes a gasoline tax set about equal to marginal external damages and a fuel economy tax that increases the price of an average non-hybrid car by about $550–$2200 relative to the price of an average hybrid car. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study exploring the assumption that government transfer policy in the U.S. is implicitly if not explicitly indexed and also the actual extent of indexing. Both the uses side and the sources side incidence of domestic climate policy using an analytical general equilibrium model was analyzed by taking into account the degree of government program indexing. The study found that changes on the user-side are relatively more burdensome for low income households.

Using an analytical general equilibrium model, we find solutions for the effect of energy policy on factor prices as well as output prices. We calibrate the model to the U.S. economy, and we consider a tax on carbon dioxide. By looking at expenditure and income patterns across household groups, we quantify the uses-side and sources-side incidence of the tax. When households are categorized either by annual income or by total annual consumption as a proxy for permanent income, the uses-side incidence is regressive. This result is robust to sensitivity analysis over various parameter values. The sources-side incidence can be progressive, U-shaped, or regressive. Results on the sources side are sensitive to parameter values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]