Optimal coverage of an emission tax in the presence of monitoring, reporting, and verification costs

Couverture optimale d'une taxe sur les émissions en présence de coût de contrôle, de rapportage et de vérification

Stéphane De Cara, Loïc Henry and Pierre-Alain Jayet

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Abstract: Environmental policies often include exemptions for some firms, e.g. the small emitters. This paper explores the implications of such exemptions in the case of an emission tax, and in the presence of monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) costs. We develop an analytical framework capturing the trade-off between the cost-effectiveness of a broader tax base, and the savings on MRV costs enabled by a partial coverage. Second-best partial coverage is defined by a threshold value of some characteristic of the firms below which firms are exempted. We characterize the optimal threshold and discuss its welfare implications. Since determining this threshold is demanding in terms of information regarding firm-level MRV and abatement costs, we show how limited knowledge about these costs at the aggregate level can be used in practice to approximate the optimal threshold. We apply this framework to assess the welfare implications of such an instrument in the case of greenhouse gas emissions from European agriculture. The findings indicate that exempting the small emitters may provide significant savings on MRV costs compared to the full coverage, while still incentivizing cost-effective reductions in emissions.

Keywords: Climate policy; Emission tax; Partial coverage; Greenhouse gas emissions; Agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-reg
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01736839v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2018, 89, pp.71 - 93. ⟨10.1016/j.jeem.2018.03.001⟩

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Journal Article: Optimal coverage of an emission tax in the presence of monitoring, reporting, and verification costs (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01736839

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeem.2018.03.001

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