In this paper we investigate the growth effect of environmental taxes when time preference is endogenously determined by environmental quality. We find that if people become more patient because of a cleaner environment, raising the environmental tax may reduce pollution and stimulate growth. Moreover, the Pigouvian principle may be inefficient in the presence of endogenous time preference.

This paper studies optimal fiscal policy, in the form of taxation and the allocation of tax revenues between infrastructure and environmental investment, in a general-equilibrium growth model with endogenous subjective discounting. A green spending reform, defined as a reallocation of government expenditures toward the environment, can procure a double dividend by raising growth and improving environmental conditions, although the environment does not impact the production technology. Also, endogenous Ramsey fiscal policy eliminates the possibility of an “environmental and economic poverty trap.” In contrast to the case of exogenous discounting, green spending reforms are the optimal response of the Ramsey government to a rise in the agents' environmental concerns.

This paper studies the growth and fiscal policy implications of the assumption that public policy generates an externality in the individual rate of time preference through the aggregate public capital stock. We examine the competitive equilibrium properties and we solve for endogenous growth–maximizing fiscal policy. We investigate the behavior of the government size and the growth rate to the sensitivity of time preference to public capital and the magnitude of public capital externality on production. We find that the Barro taxation rule [Barro, Robert J., Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990), 103–125], which states that the elasticity of public capital in the production function should equal the government size, is suboptimal. We show that the government does not necessarily have to increase income taxation following a rise in public capital intensity because of the externality of public capital on time preference and, in turn, on growth and the tax base of the economy.