Regulation and Signaling: When a Tax Is Not Just a Tax

Excise taxes are popular as regulatory policy. This popularity stems in part from their simple disincentive mechanism: higher prices mean less consumption of the regulated item. The size of the disincentive, however, may not be the whole story since governments rarely regulate without sending signals about why the regulation is necessary. This paper integrates signaling into a model designed to test the effectiveness of regulatory policies. By focusing on how signaling can be used in conjunction with more traditional policy analysis models, we offer a more complete understanding of regulation.