Resources for the Future (RFF) is pleased to share that Fellow Marc Hafstead, University Fellow Lawrence H. Goulder, and two coauthors from prestigious universities have received the 2021 Atkinson Award for best paper published in the Journal of Public Economics between 2018 and 2020.
Hafstead and Goulder, who is also affiliated with Stanford University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, share the award with GyuRim Kim of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Xianling Long of Peking University in China.
“We are proud to receive this recognition,” Hafstead said. “It’s a testament to the importance of our work and the rigor with which we conducted it. I’m honored and humbled to share this award with my great colleagues.”
The 2019 paper, “Impacts of a Carbon Tax across US Household Income Groups: What Are the Equity-Efficiency Trade-Offs?,” looks at the effects of a carbon tax across US household income groups. It explores how the tax can be designed to avoid imposing significant economic burdens on low-income households and assesses the impact of more equitable policy designs on the overall economic cost. The authors pinpoint the effects of a carbon tax on a household’s purchasing power and sources of income.
“We think this is a very interesting paper and a very worthy recipient of the award,” the journal editors Nathan Hendren and Wojciech Kopczuk wrote. “It proposes a careful approach to address a key policy question and adds new insights about distributional and efficiency impacts of a carbon tax. This is the type of work that we strive to publish.”
The Atkinson Award is conferred to the authors of the best paper published by the Journal of Public Economics over the past three years. For the 2021 award, top scholars in the field affiliated with the journal nominated papers published between 2018 and 2020—over 200 were published during this period. The winning paper was then chosen by Hendren and Kopczuk.
Hafstead and Goulder continue to collaborate on climate policy analysis through academic papers and via the RFF-sponsored Goulder-Hafstead general equilibrium model, which projects potential impacts of a range of climate change policies, including the policies analyzed in RFF’s Carbon Pricing Calculator.
From the team here at RFF—congratulations Larry, Marc, GyuRim, and Xianling!