PhD defense: Marie Young Brun

Abstract

Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and managing climate change impacts requires designing socially acceptable and equitable climate policies. The three chapters of this dissertation examine the distributional impacts of climate policies.

The first chapter, joint with Simon Feindt, analyzes how the social cost of carbon emissions is affected by climate damages on factors of production and how they are distributed across households. We address this question using a global integrated assessment model with regional disaggregation in which we decompose income inequality and climate damages into labor and capital components.

The second chapter, written with Aurélie Méjean and Stéphane Zuber, focuses on the design of equitable carbon taxation policies at the global level. We develop a global integrated assessment model with country level disaggregation and within-country inequality. We find global uniform and differentiated carbon tax schemes compatible with a 2°C scenario, and assess the efficiency, distributional and wellbeing outcomes of several revenue recycling options.

The third chapter explores how the distributive impacts of carbon taxation may affect its political acceptability at a national level. I examine whether horizontal distributional effects, i.e., effects within income groups, limit political support for carbon taxation. I develop a model of political support for carbon taxation with income and urban-rural inequality, corresponding to a difference in the level of carbon-intensive necessity consumption, such as heterogeneous needs for transport fuel depending on location.