Legislators often attach specific names to individual taxes to help explain their purpose, increase transparency, and ease public backlash over tax increases. It may be politically beneficial, but does the simple act of naming a tax and attaching it to a specific set of benefits have an actual effect in the marketplace? Do consumers respond differently to tax-induced price increases depending on what that tax is? In this article, a natural experiment is used to evaluate tax incidence after the introduction of two gasoline taxes in Alberta - 1) an increase in the generic excise tax and 2) an environmentally-targeted “carbon levy”. While similar on the cost side, the taxes were very different in name and transparency on the benefit side. Results show that benefit-side transparency can matter – responses were lower and incidence higher for the more transparent carbon levy than with the less transparent excise tax.

立法者通常在个别税项上加上特定的名称，以帮助解释其目的，增加透明度并减轻公众对增税的强烈反对。这可能在政治上是有利的，但是将税收命名并附加到一组特定的利益上的简单行为在市场上是否具有实际效果？消费者根据税收是什么而对税收引起的价格上涨做出不同的反应？在本文中，使用自然实验来评估在阿尔伯塔省引入两种汽油税后的税收发生率：1）增加一般消费税，以及2）以环境为目标的“碳税”。尽管费用方面相似，但收益方面的税收名称和透明度却大不相同。