Does a Carbon Tax Reduce CO2 Emissions? Evidence from British Columbia
By F. Pretis. Environmental and Resource Economics, 2019
119 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Using difference-in-differences, synthetic control, and introducing a new break-detection approach, I show that the introduction of North America’s first major carbon tax has reduced transportation emissions but not ‘yet’ led to large statistically significant reductions in aggregate CO2 emissions. Proposing a new method to assess policy based on breaks in difference-in-differences using machine learning, I demonstrate that neither carbon pricing nor trading schemes in other provinces are detected as large and statistically significant interventions. Instead, closures and efficiency-improvements in emission-intense industries in untaxed provinces have reduced emissions. Overall, the results show that existing carbon taxes (and prices) are likely too low to be effective in the time frame since their introduction.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/941846fd71a0729d6bb00df93c88fe0b403b5944
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Does carbon pricing reduce emissions? A review of ex-post analyses (2021, background): “The carbon tax in British Columbia has reduced emissions somewhere between 5% and 15% between 2008 and 2015 (Murray and Rivers 2015)—or a little less than 2%per year, using the most optimistic estimate (see also Rivers and Schaufele 2015, Pretis 2020).”