Publications

Working Paper
Aldy, J. E. (Working Paper). Learning How to Build Back Better through Clean Energy Program Evaluation. HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series. rwp22_010_aldy.pdf
Aldy, J. E., & Houde, S. (Working Paper). The Efficiency Consequences of Heterogeneous Behavioral Responses to Energy Fiscal Policies. NBER Working Paper Series.Abstract

The behavioral responses to taxes and subsidies are often subject to various behavioral biases and transaction costs—what we define as “microfrictions.” We develop a theoretical framework to show how these microfrictions—and their heterogeneity across the population and policy instruments—affect the design of Pigouvian policies. Standard Pigouvian pricing still holds with transaction costs, but requires adjustment with behavioral biases. We use transaction-level data from the US appliance market to estimate the heterogeneous behavioral responses to an array of energy fiscal policies and to quantify microfrictions. We then assess optimal fiscal policies and find that it is rarely optimal to couple a Pigouvian tax on energy with an investment subsidy in this context. We also find that energy labels—intended to increase the salience of energy information—can interact in perverse ways with both taxes and subsidies.

Full Paper.pdf
Aldy, J. E. (Working Paper). Climate Reparations or Redistribution.
Aldy, J. E. (Working Paper). Designing Energy and Environmental Fiscal Instruments to Improve Health. Lancet Commission on Investing in Health Working Paper.Abstract

Environmental pollution represents a significant cause of morbidity and premature mortality. Nearly seven million people die prematurely around the world each year as a result of air pollution, and hundreds of thousands more die due to unimproved water and sanitation (Lim et al., 2012). The monetized health and productivity damages from air pollution exceed a hundred billion dollars annually in China and the United States (Matus et al., 2012; US EPA, 2011).

In response to the significant impacts of pollution on health, governments traditionally pursued command-and-control regulations. These have delivered significant gains in environmental health, although high costs of regulatory mandates suggest the need for alternative approaches to reducing pollution. This paper focuses on taxes and subsidies as potential means for reducing the health burden from environmental pollution.

Pollution taxes change the business calculus for the sources of pollution (Aldy et al., 2010). Just as higher wages induce firms to invest in labor-saving capital, a pollution tax induces investments that lower pollution. A well-designed tax can ensure that all sources face the same marginal cost of pollution, thereby minimizing the aggregate costs for a given gain in environmental and health quality, and can maximize social welfare by ensuring that the tax equals the marginal benefits of pollution reduction. Raising revenue through a pollution tax could help offset labor and capital taxes, which are distortionary and impose welfare costs as a consequence of raising revenues through these means. Some countries environmentally-related tax revenues comprise 5-10 percent of total tax revenue (OECD, 2011). Taxing fossil fuels in the United States to account for local air pollution and climate change damages would raise revenues equal to about 1.5 percent of GDP (Jorgenson, 2012).

Subsidies in the energy sector can have a profound impact on pollution and health outcomes. Many countries in the developing world subsidize fossil fuels that results in excessive consumption and increased air pollution. Iran’s 2010 subsidy reform illustrates the impact of reducing fossil fuel subsides: fuel prices increases of an order of magnitude reduced carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions by 10-20 percent (IMF, 2011). Subsidies for clean energy technologies, by lowering their adoption cost, may displace dirtier sources of energy and produce public health benefits. Subsidizing specific clean energy technologies is typically more costly in aggregate than a pollution tax since it fails to fully exploit the flexibility that a tax offers. For example, a subsidy for an existing set of technologies may not reward innovation like a tax would, nor would it support technologies or process changes that are beyond the scope of the parameters of the subsidy.

The design and implementation of fiscal instruments should account for a variety of realworld considerations. Tax instruments deliver greater certainty for the returns to emission abatement investment, and could drive more abatement and innovation than command-andcontrol regulations or cap-and-trade programs. Such certainty is transparent, which may elicit political opposition since policy-makers typically prefer to impose opaque costs on constituents (Keohane et al., 1998). In some cases, it may be technically or administratively challenging to directly target the pollution externality. For example, India taxes coal as opposed to the more 2 difficult to monitor sulfur dioxide emissions from coal combustion. There are also important interaction effects among multiple policies, such as the prospect of a pollution tax to raise revenue that enables a reduction in labor and capital tax rates. This new revenue source could improve the political palatability of pollution taxes given the fiscal demands in many countries, and a prudent ramping of the policy over time may facilitate broader public support. In countries with subsidized fossil fuel prices, a pollution tax may be ineffective unless the tax can be passed through to consumers. Finally, a pollution tax or fossil fuel subsidy elimination will increase energy prices, and this could raise important distributional questions. Some policy reforms – including the British Columbia carbon tax and the 2005 fossil fuel subsidy reform in Indonesia – have included means-tested unconditional cash transfers to address regressivity concerns.

Full Paper.pdf
Aldy, J. E. (Working Paper). Evaluating Mitigation Effort: Tools and Institutions for Assessing Nationally Determined Contributions.Abstract

The emerging pledge and review approach to international climate policy provides countries with substantial discretion in how they craft their intended emission mitigation contributions. The resulting heterogeneity in mitigation pledges creates a significant demand for a wellfunctioning transparency and review mechanism. In particular, the specific forms of intended contributions necessitate economic analysis in order to estimate the aggregate effects of these contributions, as well as to permit “apples-to-apples” comparisons of mitigation efforts. This paper discusses the tools that can inform such analyses, as well as the institutional framework needed to support climate transparency. In light of the negotiating challenges with respect to transparency, the paper describes the potential for countries to implement Living Mitigation Plans that include regular updating of domestic mitigation programs with data and analyses on their outcomes. Such Living Mitigation Plans can serve as the foundation for independent, expert review of domestic mitigation programs. Moreover, they can include the inputs necessary to assess the mitigation value of domestic mitigation efforts. Such assessments could inform the linkage of domestic mitigation policies, especially among disparately designed mitigation policies.

Full Paper.pdf
Aldy, J. E., & Smyth, S. J. (Working Paper). Heterogeneity in the Value of Life.Abstract

We develop a numerical life-cycle model with choice over consumption and leisure, stochastic mortality and labor income processes, and calibrated to U.S. data to characterize willingness to pay (WTP) for mortality risk reduction. Our theoretical framework can explain many empirical findings in this literature, including an inverted-U life-cycle WTP and an order of magnitude difference in primeaged adults WTP. By endogenizing leisure and employing multiple income measures, we reconcile the literature's large variation in estimated income elasticities. By accounting for gender- and racespecific stochastic mortality and income processes, we explain the literature's black-white and female-male differences.

Full Paper.pdf
Aldy, J. E. (Working Paper). If Fossil Fuel Subsidies Are so Bad, Why Are They so Common?.
Aldy, J. E. (Working Paper). The Labor Market Impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Moratorium.Abstract

In 2010, the Gulf Coast experienced the largest oil spill, the greatest mobilization of spill response resources, and the first Gulf-wide deepwater drilling moratorium in U.S. history. Taking advantage of the unexpected nature of the spill and drilling moratorium, I estimate the net effects of these events on Gulf Coast employment and wages. Despite predictions of major job losses in Louisiana — resulting from the spill and the drilling moratorium — I find that Louisiana coastal parishes, and oil-intensive parishes in particular, experienced a net increase in employment and wages. In contrast, Gulf Coast Florida counties, especially those south of the Panhandle, experienced a decline in employment. Analysis of accommodation industry employment and wage, business establishment count, sales tax, and commercial air arrival data likewise show positive economic activity impacts in the oil-intensive coastal parishes of Louisiana and reduced economic activity along the Non-Panhandle Florida Gulf Coast.

Full Paper.pdf
Aldy, J. E. (Working Paper). Learning from Experience: An Assessment of the Retrospective Reviews of Agency Rules and the Evidence for Improving the Design and Implementation of Regulatory Policy. Full Paper.pdf
Forthcoming
Aldy, J. E., Gerarden, T. D., & Sweeney, R. L. (Forthcoming). Investment Versus Output Subsidies: Implications of Alternative Incentives for Wind Energy. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics.Abstract
This paper examines the choice between subsidizing investment or output to promote socially desirable production. We exploit a natural experiment in which wind farm developers could choose an investment or output subsidy to estimate the impact of these instruments on productivity. Using regression discontinuity and matching estimators, we find that wind farms claiming the investment subsidy produced 10 to 11 percent less power than wind farms claiming the output subsidy, and that this effect reflects subsidy incentives rather than selection. The introduction of investment subsidies caused the Federal government to spend 12 percent more per unit of output from wind farms.
ags_output_subsidies.pdf
2022
Aldy, J. E. (2022). Updating the Social Cost of Carbon. Issues in Science and Technology , 38 (3), 6-8. Publisher's Version
Aldy, J. E., Burtraw, D., Cropper, M., Fischer, C., Fowlie, M., & III, R. W. (2022). How Is the U.S. Pricing Carbon? How Could We Price Carbon? Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis , 13 (3), 310-334. aldy_et_al_jbca_2022.pdf
Aldy, J. E., & Armitage, S. (2022). The Welfare Implications of Carbon Price Certainty. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics , 9 (5), 921-946. aldy_armitage_jaere_2022.pdf
Aldy, J. E. (2022). Updating the Social Cost of Carbon. Issues in Science and Technology , 38 (3), 6-8. aldy_scc_ist_spring_2022.pdf
Aldy, J. E., Auffhammer, M., Cropper, M., Fraas, A., & Morgenstern, R. (2022). Looking Back at 50 Years of the Clean Air Act. Journal of Economic Literature , 60 (1), 179-232.
2021
Aldy, J. E. (2021). Solar Climate Intervention. Issues in Science and Technology , 38 (1). solar_climate_intervention_-_issues_in_science_and_technology.pdf
Aldy, J. E., Kotchen, M. J., Stavins, R. N., & Stock, J. H. (2021). Keep Climate Policy Focused on the Social Cost of Carbon. Science , 373 (850), 852. aldy_et_al_science_2021.pdf
Aldy, J. E., Felgenhauer, T., Pizer, W. A., Tavoni, M., Belaia, M., Borsuk, M. E., Ghosh, A., et al. (2021). Social science research to inform solar geoengineering. Science , 374, 815-818. Publisher's Version
Aldy, J. E. (2021). The Role of Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Preventing Action on the Climate Crisis. Environment Subcommittee of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Full Text.pdf
Aldy, J. E. (2021). Promoting Energy Efficiency as a Part of Decarbonization Strategy. The Environmental Forum , (Jul/Aug), 15. Full Text.pdf

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