Heterogeneous Impacts in Voluntary Agreements: A Changes-in-Changes Approach to the UK Climate Change Agreements

The limited microeconometric evidence on the efficacy of environmental Negotiated Agreements (NAs) is an obstacle to both their introduction and effective design. We help fill this gap by providing evidence on the impact of the second Climate Change Agreements (CCAs) on business electricity consumption and employment. The CCAs are NAs offering a reduction on the Climate Change Levy (CCL), an energy consumption tax, in exchange for commitments to improve energy efficiency. We use the novel changes-in-changes method to account for heterogeneity in treatment effects. Our results indicate that the second CCAs yielded improved outcomes compared to the counterfactual of full CCL with an average reduction of − 4.81% in electricity consumption. They also reveal the importance of allowing for heterogeneity, as the impact on electricity consumption at the identified deciles varied between − 9.33 and 12.54%. This is a marked difference from the first CCAs which were found to increase consumption. The heterogeneity in treatment response is corroborated when extending the study to two large industrial sectors in the sample and when studying firms selecting differing target reporting methods. Confirming the findings from earlier studies of the first scheme, our results indicate a non-statistically significant reduction in employment, about − 4.6% on average, for the second CCAs.