TAXATION, DEPLETION, AND WELFARE - A SIMULATION STUDY OF THE UNITED-STATES PETROLEUM RESOURCE

Exhaustible resources in the United States are subject to taxes on property value, production, and corporate income. As applied in practice each tax can cause high-grading-the elimination of incentives to explore, develop, and produce marginal resources-and each can tilt the time path of production toward the present or the future. The potential for such tax-induced distortions has been shown in the theoretical literature. Due to the dynamic nature of resource exploitation and the resulting complexity of models developed to study it, however, purely theoretical exercises have been unable to provide detailed results of a sort that could help guide tax policy. The present paper develops a simulation model of the U.S. petroleum resource and uses it to study the effects of taxation on exploration and production. The model is partial equilibrium in scope and views the industry as a present value maximizing representative firm. Given expectations on the future time path of price, and a function that relates reserve additions to exploratory effort, the industry chooses time paths for exploration and production. Parameters of relevant functions are estimated with data for U.S. petroleum operations in the onshore region of the lower 48 states. The simulated outcomes indicate that property and production (severance) taxes cause substantial deadweight losses, a tax on corporate income from extraction imposes a very small deadweight loss, and the property tax significantly biases utilization of the resource away from the future and toward the present. © 1993 Academic Press. All rights reserved.