• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.875-896
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• 2010

Using the difference in differences (DID) estimation method, this paper analyzes the effect of European Union's Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) on the reduction of per capita $CO_2$ emission among the twenty five participating countries. For this, the panel dataset of forty two European countries for the period 1990~2007 is constructed. Special attention is paid to the bias of the standard errors in the DID estimation due to the presence of serial correlation in the error terms. The results shows quite a robust effect of EU ETS on the reduction of per capita $CO_2$ emission among the participating countries regardless of the calculation methods of standard errors. The results also shows that the increased implicit tax rate on energy has a robust effect on the reduction of per capita $CO_2$ emission. On the contrary, the estimation results regarding the effects of per capita GDP and population density on the per capita $CO_2$ emission seem inconsistent. In particular, the environmental Kuznets curve is not statistically supported with the use of robust standard errors.