Environmental Economics

I first came to consider environmental issues as attached to transportation problems. More specifically, I have considered emissions taxation for passengers' air-transportation. Two points are raised: first, efficiency as obtained by marginal cost taxation is unlikely to exactly cover environmental damages, unless the later are linear in emissions. Second, the exact design of the tax basis matters: whether it is based upon carriers and/or passenger will affect the structure of services. This gave rise to:

"Optimal Structure of Air Transportation Services when Environmental Costs are Taken into Account"

which is joint with Kevin Guittet, a previous student of mine.

Climate change

I'm working on this issue with Justin Leroux, from HEC Montreal. Since climate change is, to some point, already taking place (though with more or less dramatic outcomes), we choose to focus on its redistributive consequences. This yields to:

"Sharing the Costs of Global Warming"

More recently, we have been proposing a new approach to carbon taxation. A non-technical version of it was issued in Tax Notes International under the title

"CO2: Tax Now, Pay Later!".

A full fledged version of our proposal is to be found in our (open access) paper:

"Tradable climate liabilities: A thought experiment".

You can find a full account of these contributions by looking at a website we set up with Justin Leroux to gather our works on "Economics, Fairness and Environment"