Estimating carbon leakage and the efficiency of border adjustments in general equilibrium — Does sectoral aggregation matter?

Abstract

Estimates of the carbon leakage resulting from sub-global climate policies tend to be lower when using economy-wide general equilibrium models than what technology-specific and bottom-up models suggest. In order to test whether this difference is due to excessive sectoral aggregation, I exploit disaggregated data and estimate unobserved values to create a dataset with rich industrial sector detail. The bias caused by sectoral aggregation is estimated by calibrating a computable general equilibrium model to this dataset and comparing results with those generated from more aggregated data.