A1448
Title: Econometrics of the distributional effects and effectiveness of carbon taxes
Authors: Andreas Lichtenberger - The New School (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: The carbon tax is one of the first pricing tools that was used to prevent climate change by bringing down carbon emissions and driving investment into cleaner options. We study the econometric effects of carbon taxation in two different ways: We jointly research (a) the income distributional effect based on the quasi-experimental introduction of a carbon tax with revenue recycling in British Columbia (BC) vs other Canadian territories with a difference-in-difference approach, and (b) estimate the macroeconomic impacts of the carbon taxes of five European countries (DK, FI, NO, PL, SW) on the economy measured by GDP per capita and the success of the carbon tax on reducing emissions using various specifications of the Vector Autoregression (VAR) and regime switching model (RSM) model. The findings suggest that (a) the BC revenue recycling approaches were not successful in mitigating expenditure increases for the lowest income groups and (b) that the European carbon tax initiatives are effective in reducing carbon emission in the high carbon tax regime in all five countries.
