Abstract
We consider a population of infinitely-lived households split into two: some agents have a high discount factor (the patients), and some others have a low one (the impatients). Polluting emissions due to economic activity harm environmental quality. The governmental policy consists in proposing households to vote for a tax to maintain environmental quality. By studying the voting equilibrium at steady states we show that the equilibrium maintenance level is the one of the median voter. We also show that (i) an increase in total factor productivity may produce effects described by the Environmental Kuznets Curve, (ii) an increase in the patience of impatient households may foster environmental quality if the median voter is impatient and maintenance positive, finally (iii) a decrease in inequality among the patient households leads to an increase in environmental quality if the median voter is patient and maintenance is positive. We show that, when the median income of the median voter is lower than the mean (which is empirically founded), our model with heterogeneous agents predicts a lower level of environmental quality than what the representative agent model would predict, and that increasing the public debt decreases the level of environmental quality.
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- 1.
For a general survey of the literature on models of economic growth with consumers having different discount factors, see Becker (2006).
- 2.
- 3.
Or the social evaluator, to take Dasgupta’s words.
- 4.
Consumers are forbidden to borrow against their future labor income. Hence, their savings must be non-negative.
- 5.
More formally, we can put the set of households in an order such that, if β i <β j and if s i∗<s j∗, then i precedes j. Such an order exists because the impatient consumers do not save in a steady-state equilibrium. Now take the household median in the sense of the introduced order, i m .
- 6.
Note that this is different from the question raised by Caselli and Ventura (2000): under which condition does a model with heterogenous agents “admits” a representative agent model, namely a model with homogenous agents displaying the same aggregate and average behavior. Indeed, in our case, by assumption, we assume capital intensity to be the same in both models. On the other hand we do not fix the maintenance level, nor do we look at the representative agent version of the model which would yield the same maintenance level.
- 7.
The case where the median income is lower than the mean is usually considered as typical on empirical grounds.
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Acknowledgements
We thank an anonymous referee for his careful reading and his suggestions. We also thank Raouf Boucekkine for discussions on a preliminary version. Part of this research was conducted during several short visits of K. Borissov at the Université Lille 1 Sciences et Technologies, laboratoire EQUIPPE—Universités de Lille, at CORE, Université catholique de Louvain and at IDP, Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis. He is grateful to the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant No. 11-06-00183) and Exxon Mobil for financial support. Preliminary versions of the paper circulated at the EAERE annual conference, at the CORE—EQUIPPE Workshop on “Political Economy and the Environment”, Louvain-la-Neuve, and at the PET 2010 conference, Istanbul.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 8.1 Proof of Proposition 1
It is sufficient to notice that since in a steady-state equilibrium we have \(\mu\varPhi(Q^{*})=\mu(Q^{*}-\kappa P^{*})+L\bar{m}\) and for each i, the sequence \((\tilde{s}_{t-1}^{i}, \tilde {c}_{t}^{i})_{t=0}^{\infty}\) given by \(\tilde{s}_{t-1}^{i}=s^{i*}\), \(\tilde{c}_{t}^{i}=c^{i*}\) is a solution to
and to refer to Becker (1980, 2006).
1.2 8.2 Proof of Lemma 1
We have:
where the functions Λ i,0 and Γ i,0 are defined as follows:
It is not difficult to check that
Therefore,
which implies (21).
1.3 8.3 Proof of Lemma 2
Using a traditional argument (see e.g. McKenzie 1986) we can prove that a sequence \((\tilde{s}_{t-1},\tilde{c}_{t},\tilde {m}_{t},\tilde{Q}_{t})_{t=0}^{\infty}\) given by (22) is a steady-state solution to problem \(\mathcal{P}_{2}\) if and only if there exist q and p such that for \(p_{t}=\beta_{i} p_{t-1}=\cdots=\beta _{i}^{t}p\) and \(q_{t+1}=\beta_{i} q_{t}=\cdots=\beta_{i}^{t+1}q\) the following relationships hold:
or, equivalently,
The existence of such q and p is equivalent to conditions (23)–(24).
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Borissov, K., Bréchet, T., Lambrecht, S. (2014). Environmental Policy in a Dynamic Model with Heterogeneous Agents and Voting. In: Moser, E., Semmler, W., Tragler, G., Veliov, V. (eds) Dynamic Optimization in Environmental Economics. Dynamic Modeling and Econometrics in Economics and Finance, vol 15. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54086-8_2
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