Time Delay, Externalities and Attitudes Toward Taxation

Public attitudes toward a policy have a significant impact on its effectiveness. This research investigates the
determinants of public attitudes for incentive-based instruments, particularly taxes, by highlighting the importance
of considering the intertemporal properties of taxation when costs and benefits of taxation occur at different times.
This project is a controlled study of how and why public attitudes towards taxation are influenced by the temporal
structure of the externalities that the taxes are meant to control.
The anticipated goal is to inform how to design institutions the public will accept and, more generally, improve the
understanding of intertemporal decision making in environments with delayed externalities.