The International Diffusion of Policies for Climate Change Mitigation

Amid renewed urgency to achieve deep reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, this paper studies the international diffusion of carbon pricing policies.

In the first part, it empirically examine to what extent the adoption of carbon pricing in a given country can explain the subsequent adoption of the same policy in other countries. In the second part, it quantifies the global benefits of policy diffusion in terms of greenhouse gas emission reductions elsewhere. To do so, it combines a large international dataset on carbon pricing with several other datasets.

The paper ultimately finds robust and statistically significant evidence for policy diffusion.