How do verified emissions announcements affect the comoves between trading behaviors and carbon prices? Evidence from EU ETS

Abstract

Verified emissions announcements are the most influential events in the European Union emissions trading scheme (EU ETS); they reveal demand information and have a significant impact on the carbon market. The extant literature tends to focus on examining the impacts of these verification events on the prices of carbon allowances, while scholars barely discuss how trading behaviors react to the announcements. Moreover, most of the studies are carried out from a macroeconomic perspective. This paper fills this gap by analyzing the impacts of the verified emissions announcements on the comoves of trading behaviors and carbon prices in Phase I (2005-2007) and Phase II (2008-2012). Specifically, we construct GARCH models to investigate the events' heterogeneous influences in different periods, i.e., the complete periods, the announcement periods, the pre- and post-announcement periods. We observe that the verified emissions announcements boost the volume of compliance trading, particularly in Phase I. Furthermore, we show that the over-allocation of carbon allowances can be even more influential in disturbing the comoves than the verification events. Our microeconomic findings confirm the maturity of EU ETS in Phase II, exhibiting good agreement with the extant macroeconomic literature. © 2018 by the authors.