Testing Innovation, Employment and Distributional Impacts of Climate Policy Packages in a Macro-evolutionary Systems Setting. WWWforEurope Working Paper No. 83

Bernhard Rengs, Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle, Ardjan Gazheli, Miklós Antal and Jeroen van den Bergh
Additional contact information
Bernhard Rengs: Austrian Academy of Sciences and Vienna University of Technology
Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle: Vienna University of Economics and Business
Miklós Antal: WIFO

in WIFO Studies from WIFO

Abstract: Climate policy has been mainly studied with economic models that assume representative, rational agents. However, it aims at changing behaviour associated with carbon-intensive goods that is often subject to bounded rationality and social preferences, such as status and imitation. Here we use a macroeconomic multi-agent model with such features to test the effect of various policies on both environmental and economic performance. The model is particularly suitable to address distributional impacts of climate policies, not only because populations of many agents are included, but also as these are composed of different classes of households driven by specific motivations. We simulate various policy scenarios, combining in different ways a carbon tax, a reduction of labour taxes, subsidies for green innovation, a price subsidy to consumers for less carbon-intensive products, and green government procurement. The results show pronounced differences with those obtained by rational-agent model studies. It turns out that demand-oriented subsidies lead to lower unemployment and higher output, but perform less well in terms of carbon emissions. The supply-oriented subsidy for green innovation results in a significant reduction of carbon emissions with a slight reduction of unemployment.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wifo.ac.at/wwa/pubid/57891 abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wfo:wstudy:57891

Access Statistics for this book

More books in WIFO Studies from WIFO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Florian Mayr ().