The effect of a carbon tax on per capita carbon dioxide emissions: evidence from Finland

This paper is a quasi-replication of Andersson (2019). I use the synthetic control method to estimate the effect of a carbon tax starting at $1.41 per tonne of CO2 and increased through successive reforms to $20 by 2011. The results show that, one year after the intervention, the tax reduced CO2 emissions from transport by around 10% relative to the synthetic counterfactual, composed from the weighted average of OECD countries. Five years after the intervention, the effect increases to almost 20% and in 2005, the last year of the dataset, the estimated effect is of around 48%. After some robustness checks, the estimated effect is a 15% reduction in 2005. My results are consistent with Andersson (2019), who finds a 12.5% reduction at the end of his studied period. My paper contributes to the thin literature analyzing the the effect of a carbon tax ex post, providing new evidence of the effectiveness of these instruments.