The heterogenous effects of environmental taxation on green investment

I am honoured and overjoyed to have received the IND+I Science award in the category of “Green Industry for Sustainable Growth.” Big thank you to Magdalena Dominguez ’17 and Rodrigo Martinez ’17 for representing me at the award ceremony! So delighted and motivated even more to work hard towards research on public policies and green innovation!

Moltes gràcies! Thank you so much for the recognition! It is an honour and such joy to realise that your research can be interesting to others and appreciated! We need new ideas for policy design that encourage firms' green investment. #GREENGROWTH #ECOTAX https://t.co/BxVH0Se3si

— Kinga Barbara Tchorzewska (@TchKinga) February 28, 2019

About the paper

This paper investigates the effectiveness of environmental taxation at stimulating adoption of energy efficient and pollution abating technologies across manufacturing firms.

To that aim, we use the fact that Spain does not have a consolidated environmental taxation policy at the national level, instead there exist significant differences between regions in implementation of the environmental taxes e.g.  air pollution taxes, waste taxes and others. We use categorical treatment matching to study the heterogenous effects of different levels of taxation on adoption of green technologies. We assess the effects between firms forced to pay environmental taxation (treated) and those that did not have to pay such taxes (controls) as well as between different levels of environmental taxation (small, medium, large). We control for time and firm fixed effects thanks to the use of a panel data set of 2,562 Spanish firms between 2008 and 2014.

We find that environmental taxation is ineffective at stimulating green technologies adoption at low levels of environmental taxation. As we increase the level of taxation the effect increases. Additionally, we find that even low levels of environmental taxation can be effective if combined with public financing. In that case the effect is stronger than from providing public financing alone.

The research leading to these results has received funding from RecerCaixa (RecerCaixa project 2016: The climate change challenge: policies for energy transition) and it is supervised by my advisor Prof. José Garcia-Quevedo.

I would also like to add that I will be awarded a SEBAP Research Mobility Grant this month, which is financing my current stay at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Prof. Tatyana Deryugina.