Ex post evaluation of an earmarked tax on air pollution

In this paper we do an ex post evaluation of the French tax on air pollution. The revenues of this tax were redistributed to polluters in the form of subsidies to abatement technologies, and the policy is a typical example of an earmarked tax. We use a two-stage estimation procedure on an unbalanced panel data set of 226 plants from three industrial sectors that are some of the main contributors to nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions. The results indicate that the overall environmental effectiveness of this particular tax/subsidy scheme can be questioned.