Tax Credits for Clean Electricity: The Distributional Impacts of Supply-Push Policies in the Power Sector
研究了2022年《通胀削减法案》授权的清洁电力税收抵免对不同收入群体的经济福利和健康影响，发现该政策虽牺牲效率但具有收入累进性，健康收益超过政策成本且低收入群体获益更多。
We evaluate distributional and efficiency consequences of the bulk power clean electricity tax credits authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. To do so, we link detailed electricity capacity expansion, computable general equilibrium, microsimulation, and air pollution models to estimate economic welfare and health incidence across demographic groups. We evaluate trade-offs between policy efficiency and income progressivity by comparing the tax credits to cap-and-trade policies. The tax credits encourage increased clean electricity investment, resulting in a reallocation of capital from elsewhere in the economy, higher prices for capital and other goods, lower power prices, and lower emissions. The tax credits yield progressive outcomes for economic welfare at the expense of efficiency while all modeled policies demonstrate progressivity in health impacts. The health benefits, absent climate benefits, exceed total policy costs and provide greater benefits for low-income and historically marginalized households given coincidence of household locations and emissions exposure intensity.