The impact of energy tax refunds on manufacturing firm performance: evidence from Finland’s 2011 energy tax reform

摘要

Attempts to cut back greenhouse gas emissions and reduce energy use have brought along increases in energy taxes or specific carbon prices in many countries.Carbon pricing has also raised concerns that energy intensive industries suffer a competitive disadvantage in terms of their cost competitiveness relative to countries with laxer environmental policies.Causal evidence on both the effect of environmental policies on manufacturing firm performance and on what market-based policies deliver in terms of emission reductions is still sparse,in particular in the context of climate policy.This paper contributes towards filling the gap by investigating the effect of an energy tax exemption on the economic and environmental performance of manufacturing firms.To secure the international competitiveness of Finland’s energy-intensive export industries,these industries are entitled to notable refunds on energy taxes if their tax expenses exceed a threshold connected to their value added.We use a detailed data set on Finnish manufacturing plants,combined with comprehensive plant-level information on energy consumption.We exploit the detailed information to estimate the impact of the energy tax exemption by combining a difference-in-differences approach with semiparametric matching techniques.