People respond to incentives—people make decisions by comparing the costs and benefits of a particular action. When either the costs or benefits change, behavior also changes. My dissertation focuses on estimating the impact of two different behaviour-altering taxes on household consumption. In the first section, I conduct an empirical examination of a hypothetical "fat tax" on household food consumption in Canada. The simulation results suggest that when fat tax revenues are recycled as lump-sum transfers to households, this policy would be the most efficient and progressive scenario from both economic and health perspectives. In the second section, I examine the impact of British Columbia's (BC) recently implemented carbon tax on household energy use from an aggregate perspective. I find no significant impact of the BC carbon tax on residential natural gas consumption. The third section is a further investigation of the BC carbon tax on household natural gas consumption varied by their environmental ideology. The results suggest that the impact of the carbon tax is more effective for non-environmentally conscious households than for other households.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/30404 |
| Date | 16 April 2015 |
| Creators | Xiang, Di |
| Contributors | Lawley, Chad (Agribusiness and Agricultural Economics), Cardwell, Ryan (Agribusiness and Agricultural Economics) Troutt, Elizabeth (Economics) Bruneau, Joel (University of Saskatchewan) |
| Source Sets | University of Manitoba Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
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