Pollution externalities : a source of endogenous business cycles.

Summary Since Zhang's paper (1999), a growing number of academic contributions have focused on exploring the channels through which pollution can be the source of endogenous economic cycles. We believe that this line of research is of great importance to the public policy maker because it reconciles his or her short-term imperatives with the long-term imperatives of environmental preservation. For this reason, this thesis proposes to explore new channels through which pollution can induce the appearance of endogenous economic cycles. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 are based on recent empirical results arguing that pollution negatively affects labor productivity and labor supply. In these chapters, we show that such pollution effects can lead to the appearance of business cycles, both deterministic and stochastic, in the vicinity of the stationary state.Chapter 4 focuses on the study of the green tax system existing in most OECD countries. In particular, we show that its regressivity with respect to household income can lead to the appearance of sun-spot equilibria.