Identification and Estimation of the Environmental Kuznets Curve: Pairwise Differencing to Deal with Nonlinearity and Nonstationarity
Suphi Sen,
Bertrand Melenberg and
Herman R.J. Vollebergh
No 5837, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo
Abstract:
We propose an estimation strategy that accounts for two major problems raised in the empirical literature testing for the prevalence of the inverted U-shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic activity, namely the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. First, we use pairwise differencing to properly identify the income effect, and to make use of estimators that likely suffer less from heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence, and other common factor problems. Second, we apply nonlinear-nonstationary parametric and non-parametric estimation techniques to estimate the pairwise differenced regressions, since panel unit root tests indicate that our income and emission series are integrated of order one. Our results for regional CO2 emissions systematically yield positive income effects while the estimated time effects do not compensate for these income effects sufficiently to generate an inverted U-shape for CO2 emissions.
Keywords: CO2 emissions; unit roots; nonlinearity; nonparametric estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 C33 O50 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5837.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
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:ces:ceswps:_5837
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().