Preliminary - DO NOT CITE (yet) Please contact the authors for any questions. Do Carbon Taxes Kill Jobs? Evidence of Heterogeneous Impacts from British Columbia

Do carbon taxes kill jobs? With pricing at $30/tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, the BC policy is currently the most aggressive revenue-neutral carbon tax and serves as a role model for many jurisdictions world-wide. There are concerns, however, that this policy negatively impacts employment. This study uses firm-level synthetic control methods (SCM) to estimate employment effects of the BC carbon tax across industries. To take full advantage of the detailed firm-level data, we propose a revised SCM method, which we test in a Monte Carlo setting. Contrary to previous results, we find that BC employment was largely unaffected by the tax.