Project description
A closer look at the climate challenge's unequal societal impact
As the EU strides boldly towards ambitious climate targets, it becomes increasingly important to consider the profound and often overlooked societal impacts of these climate policies. The challenge is to mitigate adverse effects without exacerbating inequality, a significant issue of our time. With this in mind, the ERC-funded GRETA project aims to advance climate policies by introducing an integrated methodology that not only aims to meet environmental targets but also strives for a more equitable distribution of the associated burdens and benefits across diverse segments of society. Well-designed tax policies can mitigate adverse distributional effects in consumption and labour markets in a way that is considered to be fair, while incentivising emission reductions and labour supply.
Objective
The European Unions ambitious climate policies will have wide-ranging distributional impacts in societies. Yet, it is poorly understood how to mitigate the adverse impacts and how compensation mechanisms can be designed to allocate funds to those most in need.
GRETA introduces an integrated approach for climate policies and inequality, and will increase our understanding on how to reach climate targets equitably.
In the theoretical part, we characterize a green tax reform that creates sufficient incentives to cut emissions, generates public revenue for the green transition, and ensures that costs are fairly distributed across the society. Individuals hold private information about their productivity and abatement costs. In this setting, income taxation and carbon pricing are not separable and, strikingly, effective carbon prices should vary by income-level. The theory shows that the optimal tax design depends on a limited set of sufficient statistics, including: (1) carbon price incidence per income group, (2) emission semi-elasticity per income group and (3) individuals perception of within- and across-income inequality.
In the empirical part, we quantify these sufficient statistics (1)-(3) using price variation created by the Energy Crisis of 2022 and a rich administrative data covering all Finnish firms and individuals. First, we estimate the within- and across-income inequalities created by the sudden rise in electricity prices and, using plausibly exogenous ending dates of fixed-term contract, estimate the individual-level emission semi-elasticities. Second, we study how the energy price spikes contribute to inequality though their different impacts on firm owners and workers, where our identification is based on a shift-share instrument approach. Third, we study the fairness perception by a large-scale survey where responses are linked to the administrative data. These empirical findings allow us to quantify the optimal tax design numerically.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences economics and business economics production economics productivity
- social sciences sociology governance taxation
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
00014 HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Finland
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