Research 

Abstract: How effective are climate policies in reducing emissions? Although this issue is becoming more pressing, standard models largely ignore the role of heterogeneity in firms' responses. Using administrative German firm data, I show that two determinants of carbon leakage, the emission intensity of production and the import intensity of intermediates, vary significantly across firms. I incorporate this heterogeneity into a model of heterogeneous firms to introduce two new adjustment channels to carbon pricing: the reallocation of production towards firms with a lower emission intensity or higher import intensity. I calibrate the model to the German manufacturing sector and simulate an increase in the domestic carbon price. A model with firm heterogeneity predicts greater emission reductions, smaller welfare losses, and a higher leakage rate. Production reallocation towards less emission-intensive firms offsets increased emissions from offshoring. Combining a domestic carbon price with a carbon tariff would further reduce leakage and welfare losses, though it would not yield additional emissions reductions. These results suggest that optimal carbon taxes and tariffs derived from models without firm heterogeneity may be set at an excessively high level to achieve a specified emission target.

Abstract: High carbon prices in the EU might drive emission-intensive industrial processes towards countries with relatively lower carbon prices. To prevent such carbon leakage, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) taxes emissions embedded in imports for the difference between carbon prices in the EU and the origin country. Because embedded emissions are very difficult to measure, CBAM applies to only five industries and accepts benchmarks instead of actual embedded emissions. These simplifications make CBAM tractable but compromise its effect on carbon leakage. We propose an alternative policy that requires no knowledge of embedded emissions and can be applied to all tradable sectors: the Leakage Border Adjustment Mechanism (LBAM). LBAM implements import tariffs (and, possibly, export subsidies) that sterilize the changes in imports (and exports) induced by a higher EU carbon price. LBAM requires information only about domestic output-to-emissions elasticities as well as elasticities of import demand and export supply, which we estimate using publicly available data. We calibrate a granular structural trade model with 57 countries and 131 sectors to quantify the welfare and emission impacts of LBAM. We find that LBAM improves over CBAM in terms of global emissions and EU welfare. We assess how `climate clubs’ of countries that adopt common carbon prices and border adjustments mechanisms perform on these outcomes.