Economic PolicyPub Date : 2021-02-09DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiab008
Laurence Kotlikoff, Felix Kubler, Andrey Polbin, Simon Scheidegger
{"title":"Pareto-improving carbon-risk taxation","authors":"Laurence Kotlikoff, Felix Kubler, Andrey Polbin, Simon Scheidegger","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiab008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiab008","url":null,"abstract":"Summary Anthropogenic climate change produces two conceptually distinct negative economic externalities. The first is an expected path of climate damage. The second, the focus of this paper, is an expected path of economic risk. To isolate the climate-risk problem, we consider three mean-zero, symmetric shocks in our 12-period, overlapping generations model. These shocks impact dirty energy usage (carbon emissions), the relationship between carbon concentration and temperature and the connection between temperature and damages. By construction, our model exhibits a de minimis climate problem absent its shocks. However, due to non-linearities, symmetric shocks deliver negatively skewed impacts, including the potential for climate disasters. As we show, Pareto-improving carbon taxation can dramatically lower climate risk, in general, and disaster risk, in particular. The associated climate-risk tax, which is focused exclusively on limiting climate risk, can be as large as, or larger than, the carbon average-damage tax, which is focused exclusively on limiting average damage.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138505085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2021-02-09DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiab009
Itzhak Ben-David, Yeejin Jang, Stefanie Kleimeier, Michael Viehs
{"title":"Exporting Pollution: Where Do Multinational Firms Emit CO2?","authors":"Itzhak Ben-David, Yeejin Jang, Stefanie Kleimeier, Michael Viehs","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiab009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiab009","url":null,"abstract":"Despite widespread awareness of the detrimental impact of CO2 pollution on the world climate, countries vary widely in how they design and enforce environmental laws. Using novel microdata about multinational firms' CO2 emissions across countries, we document that firms headquartered in countries with strict environmental policies perform their polluting activities abroad in countries with relatively weaker policies. These effects are largely driven by tightened environmental policies in home countries that incentivize firms to pollute abroad rather than lenient foreign policies that attract those firms. Although firms headquartered in countries with strict domestic environmental policies are more likely to export pollution to foreign countries, they nevertheless emit somewhat less overall CO2 globally.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138543623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2021-02-08DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiab006
David Miles, Victoria Monro
{"title":"UK house prices and three decades of decline in the risk-free real interest rate","authors":"David Miles, Victoria Monro","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiab006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiab006","url":null,"abstract":"SUMMARY House prices have risen substantially faster than the prices of consumer goods in most G7 countries over the past few decades. This raises major policy issues: such rises affect the distribution of wealth within and between generations, the mobility of labour and financial stability. This paper explores why such rises have happened, and what the policy implications are. The price rises have been greatest in the United Kingdom, where real house prices have risen more than three and a half times since the 1970s, substantially outpacing real income growth. Meanwhile, rental yields have been trending downwards—particularly since the mid-90s. This paper reconciles these observations by analysing the contribution of a number of drivers of house prices. It shows that the rise in house prices relative to incomes between 1985 and 2018 in the United Kingdom can be more than accounted for by the substantial decline in real risk-free interest rates over the period. This is slightly offset by net increases in home-ownership costs from higher rates of tax. Changes in the risk-free real rate are likely to have been a major driver of changes in house prices. We analyse why they have driven house prices up faster in the United Kingdom than in other advanced economies. Our model predicts that a 1% sustained increase in index-linked gilt yields from current rates could ultimately result in a fall in real house prices of around 20%.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138505093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2021-01-23DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiab001
Roberto Perotti
{"title":"The human side of austerity: health spending and outcomes during the Greek crisis","authors":"Roberto Perotti","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiab001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiab001","url":null,"abstract":"SUMMARY The Greek crisis was the deepest in post-war Europe. Public spending on health, that had grown extremely fast in the first decade of the 2000s, was cut by almost 40% between 2010 and 2016, also an unparalleled figure in post-war Europe. Although some of the cuts were mitigated by a system of clawback on the private pharmaceutical industry and by increased household out of pocket expenditure, the provision of health services was also greatly impacted by the spread of long-term unemployment, which in the employment-based Greek system left possibly millions of individuals without access to health services, until universal coverage was effectively restored in 2016. In this paper I aim at establishing the basic facts about the health crisis. Although care must be exercised in not presenting a simplistic, uniformly bleak picture, I show that several indicators point to a substantial deterioration in the health outcomes of the Greek population during the critical years of loss of universal coverage until 2016, in particular for the more vulnerable sectors of the population.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138505079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2020-11-17eCollection Date: 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiaa015
Joseph Staudt
{"title":"Mandating access: assessing the NIH's public access policy.","authors":"Joseph Staudt","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiaa015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiaa015","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In April 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented the Public Access Policy (PAP), which mandated that the full text of NIH-supported articles be made freely available on PubMed Central - the NIH's repository of biomedical research. This paper uses 600,000 NIH articles and a matched comparison sample to examine how the PAP impacted researcher access to the biomedical literature and publishing patterns in biomedicine. Though some estimates allow for large citation increases after the PAP, the most credible estimates suggest that the PAP had a relatively modest effect on citations, which is consistent with most researchers having widespread access to the biomedical literature prior to the PAP, leaving little room to increase access. I also find that NIH articles are more likely to be published in traditional subscription-based journals (as opposed to 'open access' journals) after the PAP. This indicates that any discrimination the PAP induced, by subscription-based journals against NIH articles, was offset by other factors - possibly the decisions of editors and submission behaviour of authors.</p>","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/epolic/eiaa015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38836549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 1997-10-01DOI: 10.1111/1468-0327.00024
P. Levine, Ronald Smith
{"title":"The arms trade","authors":"P. Levine, Ronald Smith","doi":"10.1111/1468-0327.00024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0327.00024","url":null,"abstract":"The arms trade is highly controversial and raises difficult policy issues. The controversies tend to concentrate on the moral, military and political dimensions of arms exports decisions. Quite a lot of light can be shed on this murky market by asking basic economic questions and using standard economic models. We begin with a structured economic description of the evolution of the international arms market in terms of the factors that influence demand and supply and thus prices and quantities. Then we review the policy issues faced by EU members: in particular, whether a common control regime is needed to harmonize their regulation of arms exports. To address these policy issues, we present some models of the market that we have developed and examine their implications for the interesting interactions that characterize the trade. Copyright Centre for Economic Policy Research, Centre for Economic Studies, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme 1997.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"1997-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75333831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}