Searching for carbon leaks in multinational companies

Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Caterina Gennaioli, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls () and Thomas Stoerk

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Does unilateral climate change policy cause companies to shift the location of production, thereby creating carbon leakage? In this paper, we analyse the effect of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on the geographical distribution of carbon emissions of multinational companies. The empirical evidence is based on unique data for the period 2007-2014 from the Carbon Disclosure Project, which tracks emissions of multinational businesses by geographical region. Because they already operate from multiple locations, multinational firms should be the most prone to carbon leakage. Our data includes regional emissions of 1,122 companies, of which 261 are subject to EU ETS regulation. We find no evidence that the EU ETS has led to a displacement of carbon emissions from Europe towards the rest of the world, including in countries with no climate policy in place and within energy-intensive companies. A large number of robustness checks confirm this finding. Overall, the paper suggest that modest differences in carbon prices between countries do not induce carbon leakage.

Keywords: carbon leakage; EU ETS; multinationals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 F23 Q56 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-02-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-eur and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1601.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Searching for carbon leaks in multinational companies (2022)
Working Paper: Searching for Carbon Leaks in Multinational Companies (2019)
Working Paper: Searching for carbon leaks in multinational companies (2019)
Working Paper: Searching for carbon leaks in multinational companies (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1601

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().