The incidence of a u.s. carbon tax

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"This paper measures the direct and indirect incidence of a carbon tax using current income and two measures of lifetime income to rank households. Our two measures of lifetime income are current consumption and adjusted or "lifetime" consumption. The use of the adjusted lifetime measure for consumption is intended to correct for long-run predictable swings in behavior. Our results suggest that in general, carbon taxes appear to be more regressive when income is used as a measure of economic welfare, than when consumption (current or lifetime) is used to measure incidence. Further, the direct component of the tax, in any given year, is significantly more regressive than the indirect component. In fact, for 1987, the indirect component of the tax is actually mildly progressive, as the higher deciles tend to pay a larger fraction of their consumption in carbon taxes. Finally we observe a shift over time with the direct component of carbon taxes becoming larger in relation to the indirect component. These effects have mostly offset each other, and the overall distribution of the total tax burden has not changed much over time"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.