Some Inconvenient Truths about Climate Change Policy: The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Policies
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Holland-2015-Some inconvenient.pdf
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Author(s)
Holland, Stephen P.
Hughes, Jonathan E.
Parker, Nathan C.
Knittel, Christopher Roland
Date Issued
December 2015
Journal
Review of Economics and Statistics
Publisher
MIT Press
Citation
Holland, Stephen P., Jonathan E. Hughes, Christopher R. Knittel, and Nathan C. Parker. “Some Inconvenient Truths About Climate Change Policy: The Distributional Impacts of Transportation Policies.” Review of Economics and Statistics 97, no. 5 (December 2015): 1052–1069. © 2015 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00452
