Gilbert E. Metcalf is a Professor of Economics at Tufts University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Metcalf has taught at Princeton University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and has served as a Visiting Scholar at the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT. He has served as a consultant to various organizations including the Chinese Ministry of Finance, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Argonne National Laboratory. Metcalf's primary research area is applied public finance with particular interests in taxation, energy, and environmental economics. His current research focuses on policy evaluation and design in the area of energy and climate change. He has published papers in numerous academic journals, has edited two books, and has contributed chapters to several books on tax policy. Metcalf received a B.A. in Mathematics from Amherst College, an M.S. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.
Articles
Market-based Policy Options to Control U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Journal of Economic Perspectives (2009)
The United States is moving closer to enacting a policy to reduce domestic emissions of...
Cost Containment in Climate Change Policy: Alternative Approaches to Mitigating Price Volatility, University of Virginia Tax Law Review (2009)
Cap and trade systems are emerging as the front-running policy choice to address climate change...
Investment in Energy Infrastructure and the Tax Code, Tax Policy and the Economy (2009)
Federal tax policy provides a broad array of incentives for energy investment. I review those...
Tax Policies for Low-Carbon Technologies, National Tax Journal (2009)
The following paper discusses the difficulties of achieving climate change policy goals with low-carbon subsidies...
The Design of a Carbon Tax (with David Weisbach), Harvard Environmental Law Review (2009)
We consider the design of a tax on greenhouse gas emissions for the United States....
Books
Contributions to Books
Environmental Taxation: What Have We Learned in This Decade?, Tax Policy Lessons From the 2000s (2009)
Tax Incidence (with Don Fullerton), Handbook of Public Economics (2002)
This chapter reviews the concepts, methods, and results of studies that analyze the incidence of...
A Tax on Output of the Polluting Industry is not a Tax on Pollution: The Importance of Hitting the Target, Behavioral and Distributional Effects of Environmental Policy (2001)
Unpublished Papers
Reacting to Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A Carbon Tax to Meet Emission Targets (2009)
In previous papers I have described a revenue and distributionally neutral approach to reducing U.S....