The macroeconomic effects of carbon pricing at a subnational level: evidence from California’s cap and trade

This paper addresses the macroeconomic effects of subnational carbon pricing initiatives, fo- cusing on California’s cap and trade. Using high-frequency data and regulatory news, I construct a carbon policy surprise series to understand the aggregate effects of a carbon policy shock using impulse response functions from a SVAR model. Results on a monthly basis suggest that a shock tightening the carbon pricing regime leads to an immediate significant reduction in carbon emis- sions by 0.05%, albeit this reduction in emissions comes at the expense of an immediate temporary fall in economic activity by 0.01%. On the other hand, results suggest that increasing carbon prices do not transmit to either household energy prices or consumer prices. Likewise, estimations suggest that a positive shock to carbon prices decreases the monetary policy rate and increases unemploy- ment, albeit not statistically significant at the 10%. I resort to local projections as robustness checks and find that the prior conclusions hold, i.e., that the California’s cap and trade initiative has significant macroeconomic effects. I check as well my prior results on a weekly basis and find strong support of my initial results: higher carbon prices decrease California’s economic activity by 0.5% after 17 weeks (4 months).