Search Results
Conference Paper
Trade elasticities
We estimate the aggregate export and import price elasticities implied by a Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) demand system, for more than 30 countries at various stages of development. Trade elasticities are given by weighted averages of sector-specific elasticities of substitution, that we estimate structurally. Both weights and substitution elasticities can be chosen to compute the response of trade to specific shocks to relative prices, bilateral or global. We document considerable, significant cross-country heterogeneity in multi-lateral trade elasticities, which is virtually ...
Discussion Paper
What Can Undermine a Carbon Tax?
Several countries have implemented a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system to establish high carbon prices and create a disincentive for the use of fossil fuels. Essentially, the tax encourages firms to substitute toward low carbon emission energy. Costs also rise for firms down the supply chain that use production inputs with high-emission content, so the total impact of a carbon tax can be large. In practice, however, firms also have an incentive to find an offset to a carbon tax. In this post, based on our recent work, we present evidence of one such adaptation strategy. We show that French ...
Discussion Paper
What Is a Carbon Tariff and Why Is the EU Imposing One?
The European Union has been an early adopter of carbon policies, with the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) in 2005. This scheme sets a common price for carbon and is applied to the most polluting manufacturing sectors. By increasing the cost of emissions-intensive production, the system incentivizes firms to decrease their use of fossil fuels. However, as we show in a companion post, the policy’s impact was moderated by firms increasing their reliance on high-emissions imports. To eliminate this workaround, the EU will expand the ETS to imports in 2026, through the ...
Report
Foreign Shocks as Granular Fluctuations
This paper uses a data set covering the universe of French firm-level sales, imports, and exports over the period 1993-2007 and a quantitative multi-country model to study the international transmission of business cycle shocks at both the micro and the macro levels. The largest firms are both important enough to generate aggregate fluctuations (Gabaix 2011), and most likely to be internationally connected. This implies that foreign shocks are transmitted to the domestic economy primarily through the largest firms. We first document a novel stylized fact: larger French firms are significantly ...
Report
Firms’ Supply Chain Adaptation to Carbon Taxes
This paper studies how firms adjust input sourcing in response to climate policy. Using the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) as a natural experiment and French product-level import and production data, we show that firms increasingly shifted imports of ETS-regulated inputs to non-EU countries over the 2010s as the policy became more stringent, indicating carbon leakage. This leakage is economically significant: the share of ETS-regulated products sourced from outside the EU rose by 4.3 percentage points after the ETS was implemented. Motivated by these empirical findings, we estimate a ...