The Future Trajectory of US CO2 Emissions: The Role of State vs. Aggregate Information

Maximilian Auffhammer and Ralf Steinhauser

Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series from Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley

Abstract: This paper provides comparisons of a variety of time series methods for short run forecasts of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, for the United States, using a recently released state level data set from 1960-2001. We test the out-of-sample performance of univariate and multivariate forecasting models by aggregating state level forecasts versus forecasting the aggregate directly. We find evidence that forecasting the disaggregate series and accounting for spatial effects drastically improves forecasting performance under Root Mean Squared Forecast Error Loss. Based on the in-sample observations we attempt to explain the emergence of voluntary efforts by states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We find evidence that states with decreasing per capita emissions and a "greener" median voter are more likely to push towards voluntary cutbacks in emissions.

Keywords: carbon dioxide emissions; econometric models; forecasting; greenhouse effect; Life Sciences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-03-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/4878j5w0.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: THE FUTURE TRAJECTORY OF U.S. CO2 EMISSIONS: THE ROLE OF STATE VS. AGGREGATE INFORMATION* (2007)
Working Paper: The Future Trajectory of US CO2 Emissions: The Role of State vs. Aggregate Information (2006)
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:cdl:agrebk:qt4878j5w0

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series from Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().