Well-intended policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions may have unintended undesirable consequences. Recently, a large literature has emerged showing under what conditions this so-called 'Green Paradox' may occur. We review this literature and identify the key mechanisms behind these...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of a unilateral change in an emissions tax in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms. We find a positive effect of tighter environmental policy on average productivity in the reforming country through reallocation of labour towards exporting...

International trade policy analysis has tended to focus on the production side of general equilibrium, with policies such as a tariff or carbon tax affecting international and internal income distributions through a Heckscher-Ohlin nexus of factor intensities and factor endowments. Here I move...

This paper derives a new effect of trade liberalisation on the quality of the environment. We show that in the presence of heterogeneous firms the aggregate volume of emissions is influenced not only by the long-established scale effect, but also by a reallocation effect resulting from an...

We examine an open economy's strategy to reduce its carbon emissions by replacing its consumption of coal—very carbon intensive—with gas—less so. Unlike the standard theoretical approach to carbon leakage, we show that unilateral CO2 reduction policies generate a higher leakage rate in the...

We examine an open economy’s strategy to reduce its carbon emissions by replacing its consumption of coal—very carbon intensive—with gas—less so. Unlike the standard analysis of carbon leakage, unilateral carbon-reduction policies with more than one carbon energy source may turn...

We develop a multi-sector structural trade model with emissions from production and a con- stant elasticity of fossil fuel supply function to simulate the consequences of unilateral withdrawals from the Paris Agreement. Taking into account both direct and leakage effects, we find that a US...

Has the Kyoto Protocol induced carbon leakage? We conduct the first empirical ex-post evaluation of the Protocol. We derive a theoretical gravity equation for the CO2 content of trade, which accounts for intermediate inputs, both domestic and imported. The structure of our new panel database of...

The European Union (EU) is implementing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) at its borders, which will require exporters of basic materials to surrender emission permits when exporting to the EU market. Since it makes foreign producers compete under a carbon price, the EU CBAM may...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...