Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
959091 Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 2009 9 Pages PDF
Abstract

We consider the pricing of a uniformly mixed pollutant with a model of optimal, possibly firm-specific, emissions taxes and their enforcement under incomplete information about firms’ abatement costs, enforcement costs, and pollution damage. We argue that optimality requires an enforcement strategy that induces full compliance by every firm, except possibly when a regulator can base the probabilities of detecting individual violations on observable correlates of violators’ actual emissions. Moreover, optimality requires discriminatory taxes, except when a regulator is unable to use observable firm-level characteristics to gain some information about the variation in firms’ abatement costs or monitoring costs.

Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Economics, Econometrics and Finance Economics and Econometrics
Authors
, , ,