Suchergebnisse

Fiscal considerations may shift governmental priorities away from environmental concerns: finance ministers face strong demand for public expenditures such as infrastructure investments but they are constrained by international tax competition. We develop a multi-region model of tax competition and resource extraction to assess the fiscal incentive of imposing a tax on carbon rather than on capital. We explicitly model international capital and resource markets, as well as intertemporal capital accumulation and resource extraction. While fossil resources give rise to scarcity rents, capital does not. With carbon taxes, the rents can be captured and invested in infrastructure, which leads to higher welfare than under capital taxation. This result holds even without modeling environmental damages. It is robust under a variation of the behavioral assumptions of resource importers to coordinate their actions, and a resource exporter's ability to counteract carbon policies. Further, no green paradox occurs—instead, the carbon tax constitutes a viable green policy, since it postpones extraction and reduces cumulative emissions.

Hinreichend ambitionierte CO2‐Preise lenken Realinvestitionen grundsätzlich in die richtige Richtung. Wenn deren Einführung der Politik jedoch nicht gelingt, bedarf es anderer Instrumente, um eine Fehlallokation von Kapital zu verhindern. Wir schlagen daher im Zuge des europäischen Green Deals einen Investitionsfonds für die EU vor, der sich durch langfristige, staatlich gesicherte Anleihen finanziert, um langfristig (zins)verbilligte Kredite an Unternehmen zu vergeben, die in nachhaltige Projekte mit dem primären Ziel der Treibhausgasneutralität investieren. Diese Subventionierung soll so lange Anreize für CO2‐vermeidende Investitionen setzen, bis ein ausreichend hoher CO2‐Preis eingeführt ist. Für Unternehmen ergeben sich so Anreize, ihre Geschäftsmodelle nachhaltiger zu gestalten und den Transformationsprozess der Wirtschaft umzusetzen.

Wealth inequality is a major political concern in most OECD countries. Under this premise, we analyze different policy instruments in terms of their impact on wealth inequality and output. In a general equilibrium model, we disaggregate wealth in its capital and land components, and savings in their life-cycle and bequest components. Households are heterogeneous in their taste for leaving bequests. We show that governments have considerable freedom in reducing wealth inequality without sacrificing output: Land rent taxes enhance output due to a portfolio effect and reduce wealth inequality slightly. Bequest taxes have the highest potential to reduce inequality, and their effect on output is moderate. By contrast, we confirm the standard result that capital taxes reduce output strongly and show that they only have moderate redistributive effects. Furthermore, we find that using the tax proceeds for transfers to the young generations enhances output the most and further reduces wealth inequality.