Gilbert E. Metcalf

Last updated
Gilbert E. Metcalf
OccupationAcademic economist (Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University)
Employer Tufts University
TitleJohn DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University
Term1994-2022

Gilbert E. Metcalf is the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service Emeritus at Tufts University where he was a professor of economics. Currently, he is a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School as well as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a University Fellow at Resources For The Future. Under the Obama Administration, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy at the U.S. Department of Treasury where he was the founding U.S. Board Member for the UN based Green Climate Fund. His research interests are in the areas of energy, environmental, and climate policy. [1]

Contents

Biography

Gilbert Metcalf was born in Utica, NY and earned a B.A. in mathematics from Amherst College in 1976. He subsequently earned an M.S. in Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts in 1982 and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1988 where Martin Feldstein served as his primary advisor. His first academic appointment was in the Department of Economics at Princeton University where he taught from 1988 to 1994. In 1994, he moved to Tufts University, first as an assistant professor (1994 - 1997), then as an associate professor (1997 - 1999) and then as a full professor (1999–present). In 2018 he was appointed to the John DiBiaggio Professorship of Citizenship and Public Service. While at Tufts, Metcalf has held visiting appointments in the Department of Economics at MIT, and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 2017 he was a visiting scholar at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2011 - 2012, Metcalf served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy at the U.S. Department of Treasury where he oversaw the U.S. government's engagement in multilateral environmental funds including the Climate Investment Funds, the Global Environment Facility, and the Green Climate Fund. Metcalf served as a member of the board of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists in 2014 - 2016 where he led efforts to endow the Oates Memorial Fund to support AERE's annual Outstanding Dissertation Award. AERE members and friends contributed and pledged over $37,000 in the first year of fundraising to the fund. [2] In 2011, he served as the vice president for academic affairs for the United States Association for Energy Economics (USAEE). He currently serves as a Lead Author for the Working Group III contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. [3] In other professional service, Metcalf has been an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (2008 - 2010) and a member of the board of editors of the American Economic Review (2000 - 2006). He currently serves on the Advisory Board of Citizens' Climate Lobby and the Board of Editors of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. Metcalf's university service includes acting as chair of the Department of Economics (2002 - 2005) and serving as a member of the Presidential Search Committee that hired Lawrence Bacow in 2001. Metcalf subsequently chaired the Task Force on the Undergraduate Experience which developed a number of recommendations for enhancing undergraduate life and scholarship at Tufts.

Research

Metcalf's research area is in the areas of public finance, tax policy, energy economics, and environmental economics. According to IDEAS/REPEC, Metcalf ranks in the top three percent of economists worldwide on the basis of research. [4] He has over 7200 citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 39. [5] Metcalf has published over 130 papers, book chapters, and other publications including 3 edited books. [6] His newest book, Paying for Pollution: Why a Carbon Tax is Good for America , was published by Oxford University Press at the end of 2018.

Tax Policy

Metcalf's early research focused on the fiscal interaction between federal tax policy and state and local government budgets. An early paper with Martin Feldstein challenged the view that eliminating the federal deduction for state and local taxes would affect overall spending at the state and local level. The paper did find that sub-national governments would change their portfolio of tax collections to rely less heavily on taxes that are no longer deductible and more heavily on those taxes that continue to be deductible, including business taxes. [7] Metcalf also wrote a series of papers on the role of tax-exempt financing in state and local borrowing. [8] [9] [10] Metcalf subsequently wrote a series of papers on value-added taxation that argued, among other things, that standard distributional analyses overstate the regressivity of a VAT tax. [11] [12] [13] Another set of papers focused on the role of uncertainty in tax policy and its impact on investment using stochastic calculus techniques and the work by Robert Pindyck and Avinash Dixit on irreversible investment in the face of uncertainty. [14] [15] [16]

Energy and Environmental Economics

In the early 1990s, Metcalf, in a series of papers with Kevin Hassett, assessed the role of federal tax policy to encourage greater energy efficiency investments in which they challenged the view that high hurdle rates for these investments reflected a market failure. They argued that a variety of alternative explanations could explain the slow take-up of energy efficient capital and that the case for a market failure necessitating government intervention had not been made. [17] [18] [19] Metcalf has gone on to write other papers arguing for the role of tax policy to address market failures such as pollution that could incentivize investments in energy efficiency. [20] [21] Along with Don Fullerton, Metcalf has written a series of papers examining the optimal tax on pollution in a second-best world (the double dividend hypothesis). Their work focused on the role of scarcity rents to explain why the optimal tax on pollution should be less than the marginal damages from the pollutant. [22] [23] Other research focuses on energy security, and subsidies for energy investment and production. [24] [25] [26] [27] In one recent paper, Metcalf argues that eliminating tax incentives for oil and gas production would save roughly $4 billion a year for the federal government and have a negligible impact on energy prices and domestic production. [28] [29]

Climate Policy

Recently, Metcalf has focused on policy design and evaluation to address climate change. His extensive work on carbon taxation has been highly cited. [30] He has written papers on the distributional burden of carbon taxes, arguing that the view that carbon taxes are regressive is incorrect when 1) lifetime incidence is considered; and 2) the use of proceeds from the tax is taken into account. [31] [32] [33] In particular, he has argued for a revenue neutral carbon tax to avoid conflating issues of the appropriate size of the federal budget and climate policy. [34] [35] Recent work focuses on how a carbon tax can be designed to provide some assurance that emission reduction targets will be met over time. [36] [37] In particular, he has advocated for an emissions assurance mechanism (EAM) to address concerns that a carbon tax will not necessarily reduce emissions. [38] The Climate Leadership Council has included an EAM as part of its plan. [39] Other climate related work focuses on international linkage of regional climate policies [40] [41] [42] and the role of integrated assessment models in climate policy design. [43]

Related Research Articles

Environmental finance is a field within finance that employs market-based environmental policy instruments to improve the ecological impact of investment strategies. The primary objective of environmental finance is to regress the negative impacts of climate change through pricing and trading schemes. The field of environmental finance was established in response to the poor management of economic crises by government bodies globally. Environmental finance aims to reallocate a businesses resources to improve the sustainability of investments whilst also retaining profit margins.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carbon tax</span> Tax on carbon emissions

A carbon tax is a tax levied on the carbon emissions required to produce goods and services. Carbon taxes are intended to make visible the "hidden" social costs of carbon emissions, which are otherwise felt only in indirect ways like more severe weather events. In this way, they are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by increasing prices of the fossil fuels that emit them when burned. This both decreases demand for goods and services that produce high emissions and incentivizes making them less carbon-intensive. In its simplest form, a carbon tax covers only CO2 emissions; however, it could also cover other greenhouse gases, such as methane or nitrous oxide, by taxing such emissions based on their CO2-equivalent global warming potential. When a hydrocarbon fuel such as coal, petroleum, or natural gas is burned, most or all of its carbon is converted to CO
2
. Greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change, which damages the environment and human health. This negative externality can be reduced by taxing carbon content at any point in the product cycle. Carbon taxes are thus a type of Pigovian tax.

Energy economics is a broad scientific subject area which includes topics related to supply and use of energy in societies. Considering the cost of energy services and associated value gives economic meaning to the efficiency at which energy can be produced. Energy services can be defined as functions that generate and provide energy to the “desired end services or states”. The efficiency of energy services is dependent on the engineered technology used to produce and supply energy. The goal is to minimise energy input required to produce the energy service, such as lighting (lumens), heating (temperature) and fuel. The main sectors considered in energy economics are transportation and building, although it is relevant to a broad scale of human activities, including households and businesses at a microeconomic level and resource management and environmental impacts at a macroeconomic level.

An environmental tax, ecotax, or green tax is a tax levied on activities which are considered to be harmful to the environment and is intended to promote environmentally friendly activities via economic incentives. A notable example is carbon tax. Such a policy can complement or avert the need for regulatory approaches. Often, an ecotax policy proposal may attempt to maintain overall tax revenue by proportionately reducing other taxes ; such proposals are known as a green tax shift towards ecological taxation. Ecotaxes address the failure of free markets to consider environmental impacts.

A green economy is an economy that aims at reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, and that aims for sustainable development without degrading the environment. It is closely related with ecological economics, but has a more politically applied focus. The 2011 UNEP Green Economy Report argues "that to be green, an economy must not only be efficient, but also fair. Fairness implies recognizing global and country level equity dimensions, particularly in assuring a Just Transition to an economy that is low-carbon, resource efficient, and socially inclusive."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate change mitigation</span> Actions to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to limit climate change

Climate change mitigation is action to limit climate change by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases or removing those gases from the atmosphere. The recent rise in global average temperature is mostly due to emissions from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Mitigation can reduce emissions by transitioning to sustainable energy sources, conserving energy, and increasing efficiency. It is possible to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by enlarging forests, restoring wetlands and using other natural and technical processes. Experts call these processes carbon sequestration. Governments and companies have pledged to reduce emissions to prevent dangerous climate change in line with international negotiations to limit warming by reducing emissions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Nordhaus</span> American economist

William Dawbney Nordhaus is an American economist, a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modeling and climate change, and a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Nordhaus received the prize "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carbon Disclosure Project</span> International non-profit organisation

The CDP is an international non-profit organisation based in the United Kingdom, Japan, India, China, Germany, Brazil and the United States of America that helps companies, cities, states, regions and public authorities disclose their environmental impact. It aims to make environmental reporting and risk management a business norm, driving disclosure, insight, and action towards a sustainable economy. In 2022, nearly 20,000 organizations disclosed their environmental information through CDP.

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is the marginal cost of the impacts caused by emitting one extra tonne of carbon emissions at any point in time. The purpose of putting a price on a ton of emitted CO2 is to aid people in evaluating whether adjustments to curb climate change are justified. The social cost of carbon is a calculation focused on taking corrective measures on climate change which can be deemed a form of market failure. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that a carbon price of $100/tCO2 could reduce global GHG emissions by at least half the 2019 level by 2030.

Integrated assessment modelling (IAM) or integrated modelling (IM)  is a term used for a type of scientific modelling that tries to link main features of society and economy with the biosphere and atmosphere into one modelling framework. The goal of integrated assessment modelling is to accommodate informed policy-making, usually in the context of climate change though also in other areas of human and social development. While the detail and extent of integrated disciplines varies strongly per model, all climatic integrated assessment modelling includes economic processes as well as processes producing greenhouse gases. Other integrated assessment models also integrate other aspects of human development such as education, health, infrastructure, and governance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottmar Edenhofer</span> German economist

Ottmar Georg Edenhofer is a German economist who is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on climate change policy, environmental and energy policy, and energy economics. His work has been heavily cited. Edenhofer currently holds the professorship of the Economics of Climate Change at the Technical University of Berlin. Together with Earth scientist Johan Rockström, economist Ottmar Edenhofer is scientific director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), representing the interdisciplinary and solutions-oriented approach of the institute. Furthermore, he is director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). From 2008 to 2015 he served as one of the co-chairs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III "Mitigation of Climate Change".

The Green Paradox is a controversial book by German economist, Hans-Werner Sinn, describing the observation that an environmental policy that becomes greener with the passage of time acts like an announced expropriation for the owners of fossil fuel resources, inducing them to accelerate resource extraction and hence to accelerate global warming.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economics of climate change mitigation</span> Part of the economics of climate change related to climate change mitigation

The economics of climate change mitigation is part of the economics of climate change related to climate change mitigation, that is actions that are designed to limit the amount of long-term climate change. Mitigation may be achieved through the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the enhancement of sinks that absorb GHGs, for example forests.

Robert Stephen Pindyck is an American economist, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance at Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Tel-Aviv University, Harvard University, and Columbia University.

Cameron Hepburn is the Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, the Battcock Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Oxford, and formerly a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also the Director of the Economics of Sustainability Programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Co-benefits of climate change mitigation</span> Positive benefits of greenhouse gas reduction besides climate change mitigation

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sustainable Development Goal 13</span> UN goal to combat climate change

Sustainable Development Goal 13 is to limit and adapt to climate change. It is one of 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. The official mission statement of this goal is to "Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts". SDG 13 and SDG 7 on clean energy are closely related and complementary.

Sabine Fuss is a German climate scientist. She heads the "Sustainable Resource Management and Global Change" working group at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). She is a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin.

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References

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  2. "Oates Memorial Fund". www.aere.org. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  3. "IPCC Authors (beta)". www.ipcc.ch. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  4. "Economist Rankings | IDEAS/RePEc". ideas.repec.org. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
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  6. CV available at https://works.bepress.com/gilbert_metcalf/about/
  7. Feldstein, Martin S.; Metcalf, Gilbert E. (1987). "The Effect of Federal Tax Deductibility on State and Local Taxes and Spending". Journal of Political Economy. 95 (4): 710–736. doi:10.1086/261482. ISSN   0022-3808. S2CID   62890752.
  8. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (1990). "Arbitrage and the Savings Behavior of State Governments" (PDF). The Review of Economics and Statistics. 72 (3): 390–396. doi:10.2307/2109346. JSTOR   2109346. S2CID   92995708.
  9. Gordon, Roger H.; Metcalf, Gilbert E. (1991). "Do Tax-Exempt Bonds Really Subsidize Municipal Capital?" (PDF). National Tax Journal. 44 (4): 71–79. doi:10.1086/NTJ41788923. JSTOR   41788923. S2CID   232214573.
  10. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (1993-07-01). "Federal taxation and the supply of state debt" (PDF). Journal of Public Economics. 51 (3): 269–285. doi:10.1016/0047-2727(93)90066-3. ISSN   0047-2727. S2CID   153953164.
  11. Caspersen, Erik; Metcalf, Gilbert (1994-12-01). "Is a value added tax regressive? Annual versus lifetime incidence measures". National Tax Journal. 47 (4): 731–746. doi:10.1086/NTJ41789105. S2CID   232212214.
  12. Metcalf, Gilbert E (1995). "Value-Added Taxation: A Tax Whose Time Has Come?". Journal of Economic Perspectives. 9 (1): 121–140. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.1027.6569 . doi:10.1257/jep.9.1.121. ISSN   0895-3309. S2CID   154021640.
  13. E, Metcalf, Gilbert (1994). "Life Cycle versus Annual Perspectives on the Incidence of a Value Added Tax". NBER.
  14. Hassett, Kevin A.; Metcalf, Gilbert E. (July 1999). "Investment with Uncertain Tax Policy: Does Random Tax Policy Discourage Investment". The Economic Journal. 109 (457): 372–393. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.194.7555 . doi:10.1111/1468-0297.00453. ISSN   0013-0133. S2CID   9350713.
  15. Metcalf, Gilbert E; Hassett, Kevin A (1995-11-01). "Investment under alternative return assumptions Comparing random walks and mean reversion" (PDF). Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. 19 (8): 1471–1488. doi:10.1016/0165-1889(94)00838-9. ISSN   0165-1889. S2CID   153692000.
  16. Metcalf, Gilbert E.; Rosenthal, Donald (1995). "The "New" View of Investment Decisions and Public Policy Analysis: An Application to Green Lights and Cold Refrigerators". Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. 14 (4): 517. doi:10.2307/3324907. ISSN   0276-8739. JSTOR   3324907.
  17. Hassett, Kevin A.; Metcalf, Gilbert E. (1993). "Energy conservation investment: Do consumers discount the future correctly?". Energy Policy. 21 (6): 710–716. doi: 10.1016/0301-4215(93)90294-P . ISSN   0301-4215.
  18. Hassett, Kevin A.; Metcalf, Gilbert E. (1996). "Can irreversibility explain the slow diffusion of energy saving technologies?". Energy Policy. 24 (1): 7–8. doi:10.1016/0301-4215(95)00150-6. ISSN   0301-4215.
  19. Metcalf, Gilbert E.; Hassett, Kevin A. (1999). "Measuring the Energy Savings from Home Improvement Investments: Evidence from Monthly Billing Data" (PDF). The Review of Economics and Statistics. 81 (3): 516–528. doi:10.1162/003465399558274. JSTOR   2646774. S2CID   57570298.
  20. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (1999). "A Distributional Analysis of Green Tax Reforms" (PDF). National Tax Journal. 52 (4): 655–681. doi:10.1086/NTJ41789423. JSTOR   41789423. S2CID   232213076.
  21. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (2007). "Federal Tax Policy towards Energy". Tax Policy and the Economy. 21: 145–184. doi:10.1086/tpe.21.20061917. hdl: 1721.1/38456 . S2CID   154565492.
  22. Fullerton, Don; Metcalf, Gilbert E. (2001). "Environmental controls, scarcity rents, and pre-existing distortions". Journal of Public Economics. 80 (2): 249–267. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.195.5094 . doi:10.1016/S0047-2727(00)00087-6. ISSN   0047-2727. S2CID   13963313.
  23. Fullerton, Don; Metcalf, Gilbert E (1998). "Environmental Taxes and the Double-Dividend Hypothesis: Did You Really Expect Something for Nothing?". Chicago-Kent Law Review. 73: 221–256.
  24. Wolfram, Catherine; Metcalf, Gilbert E. (2015). "Cursed Resources? Political Conditions and Oil Market Outcomes". The Energy Journal. 36 (3).
  25. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (2014-11-10). "The Economics of Energy Security" (PDF). Annual Review of Resource Economics. 6 (1): 155–174. doi:10.1146/annurev-resource-100913-012333. ISSN   1941-1340. S2CID   154619782.
  26. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (2009). "Tax Policies for Low-Carbon Technologies". www.ntanet.org. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  27. Metcalf, Gilbert (2008). "Using Tax Expenditures to Achieve Energy Policy Goals". Tax Policy and the Economy. doi: 10.3386/w13753 .
  28. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (2018). "The Impact of Removing Tax Preferences for US Oil and Natural Gas Production: Measuring Tax Subsidies by an Equivalent Price Impact Approach" (PDF). Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. 5 (1): 1–37. doi:10.1086/693367. ISSN   2333-5955. S2CID   157762275.
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  31. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (1999). "A Distributional Analysis of Green Tax Reforms" (PDF). National Tax Journal. 52 (4): 655–681. doi:10.1086/NTJ41789423. JSTOR   41789423. S2CID   232213076.
  32. Hassett, Kevin A.; Mathur, Aparna; Metcalf, Gilbert E. (2009). "The Incidence of a U.S. Carbon Tax: A Lifetime and Regional Analysis". The Energy Journal. 30 (2): 155–178. doi:10.5547/ISSN0195-6574-EJ-Vol30-No2-8. S2CID   15385573.
  33. Metcalf, G. E. (2008-09-24). "Designing a Carbon Tax to Reduce U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions" (PDF). Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. 3 (1): 63–83. doi:10.1093/reep/ren015. ISSN   1750-6816. S2CID   153435315.
  34. Metcalf, G. E. (2008-09-24). "Designing a Carbon Tax to Reduce U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions" (PDF). Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. 3 (1): 63–83. doi:10.1093/reep/ren015. ISSN   1750-6816. S2CID   153435315.
  35. Metcalf, Gilbert E.; Weisbach, David (2009). "The Design of a Carbon Tax". Harvard Environmental Law Review. 33: 499–556.
  36. Metcalf, Gilbert E. (2009). "Cost Containment in Climate Change Policy: Alternative Approaches to Mitigating Price Volatility". heinonline.org. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
  37. "Resolving the Inherent Uncertainty of Carbon Taxes". harvardelr.com. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
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  39. "Our Plan". Climate Leadership Council. Retrieved 2020-02-23.
  40. Metcalf, G. E.; Weisbach, D. (2011-12-14). "Linking Policies When Tastes Differ: Global Climate Policy in a Heterogeneous World". Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. 6 (1): 110–129. doi:10.1093/reep/rer021. ISSN   1750-6816. S2CID   15411542.
  41. Bodansky, Daniel M.; Hoedl, Seth A.; Metcalf, Gilbert E.; Stavins, Robert N. (2015-07-29). "Facilitating linkage of climate policies through the Paris outcome". Climate Policy. 16 (8): 956–972. doi:10.1080/14693062.2015.1069175. ISSN   1469-3062. S2CID   15602666.
  42. Mehling, Michael A.; Metcalf, Gilbert E.; Stavins, Robert N. (2018-03-02). "Linking climate policies to advance global mitigation" (PDF). Science. 359 (6379): 997–998. Bibcode:2018Sci...359..997M. doi:10.1126/science.aar5988. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   29496871. S2CID   3636681.
  43. Metcalf, Gilbert E.; Stock, James H. (2017). "Integrated Assessment Models and the Social Cost of Carbon: A Review and Assessment of U.S. Experience". Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. 11 (1): 80–99. doi:10.1093/reep/rew014. ISSN   1750-6816. S2CID   49555773.