Some Inconvenient Truths about Climate Change Policy: The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Policies

Stephen P. Holland; Jonathan E. Hughes; Christopher R. Knittel; Nathan Parker

doi:10.1162/rest_a_00452

Some Inconvenient Truths about Climate Change Policy: The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Policies

Stephen P. Holland^1,2; Jonathan E. Hughes³; Christopher R. Knittel^1,4,5; Nathan Parker⁶

¹ National Bureau of Economic Research · ² University of North Carolina at Greensboro · ³ University of Colorado System · ⁴ Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology · ⁵ Massachusetts Institute of Technology · ⁶ University of California, Davis

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2015 open access

Climate policy has favored costly measures that implicitly or explicitly subsidize lowcarbon fuels.We simulate four transportation sector policies: cap and trade (CAT), ethanol subsidies, a renewable fuel standard (RFS), and a lowcarbon fuel standard. Our simulations confirm that alternatives to CAT are 2.5 to 4 times more costly but are amenable to adoption due to right-skewed distributions of gains. We analyze voting on the Waxman-Markey (WM) CAT bill. Conditional on a district’s CAT gains, a district’s RFS gains are negatively correlated with the likelihood of voting for WM. Our analysis supports campaign contributions as a partial mechanism.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00452
Volume: 97 (5)
Pages: 1052-1069
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
Sources: openalex crossref