ACE—Analytic Climate Economy

Abstract

I study optimal carbon taxation in an analytic quantitative integrated assessment model (IAM) that links IAM components, parametric assumptions, and calibration approaches directly to their policy impacts. I show how temperature’s tax impact differs from that of previously analytically modeled carbon dynamics. Novel to analytic IAMs are a general economy, energy sectors including capital, varying degrees of substitutability across energy sources, an approximation of capital persistence, objective functions that include CES preferences and population weighting, and an explicit model of the greenhouse effect and ocean-atmosphere temperature dynamics. The paper enables economists to develop better-informed opinions about the social cost of carbon. (JEL H23, H43, Q54, Q58)