Seminar Vol. 163
Title: Carbon Market and Emission Reduction: Evidence from China’s Carbon Market Pilots
Speaker: Jing Cao, Tsinghua University
Time: May 27th, 2019 13:30–15:00
Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (IESR, JNU College of Economics)
About the speaker:
Jing Cao is an Associate Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University. She is also Deputy Director of Institute for Urban Governance and Sustainable Urbanization, Deputy Director of Institute of Energy, Environment, Economy, and Deputy Director of Hang Lung Center for Real Estate at Tsinghua University. She was awarded the 2014 Excellent Youth NSFC funding on “Environmental Economics and Policy” in China, 2010 McKinsey China Economics Award and 2005 Gregory Chow Best Paper Award. Her research focus on Environmental Economics, Energy Economics, Climate Change Policy Modeling Analysis. She has published peer-reviewed papers on Management Science, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Energy Journal, Energy Economics, Journal of Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Environmental and Resource Economics, Resource and Energy Economics and etc. Her research includes dynamic CGE model analysis on China’s national ETS and carbon tax, China’s 11th Five Year Plan sulfur mandate policies, 12th Five Year Plan NOx control policies; environmental health and air pollution; empirical analysis on firm level energy conservation and environmental pollution abatements; optimal environmental taxation; gasoline demand elasticity estimation; green total factor productivity measurements; climate change modeling and economics analysis of climate policies and etc.
Abstract:
In this paper, we empirically investigate the effectiveness of China’s carbon markets on emission mitigation. Exploiting China’s carbon market pilots as a quasi-experiment with plant-level data on China’s electricity sector, we show that the carbon markets promoted CO2 emission mitigation by reducing coal consumption of regulated coal-fired power plants. No evidence of carbon leakage was detected in unregulated coal-fired power plants of pilot and other provinces, while the effects were spilled to non-fossil-fuel power plants in pilot provinces, pushing up their electricity generation, operating hours and installed capacities. We also contribute to the literature on air quality co-benefits of carbon markets by empirically identifying causal effects of China’s carbon markets on air pollutant concentrations.
