2026 AEJ Best Paper Awards

The 2026 AEJ Best Paper Awards have been announced on April, 7th 2026

Do Carbon Offsets Offset Carbon? — AEJ: Applied Economics

Raphael Calel, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezleprêtre, and Matthieu Glachant study India’s wind farms under the Clean Development Mechanism, the world’s largest carbon offset program. The program allows polluters to increase emissions by subsidizing equivalent reductions elsewhere. However, the authors find that at least 52 percent of approved offsets went to projects that would have been built regardless of the subsidy, enabling as much as 28 million additional tonnes of CO₂ emissions. Extrapolated globally, carbon offset programs may permit 6.1 billion extra tonnes of emissions—undermining their core environmental rationale. (AEJ: Applied Economics,  Vol. 17, No. 1, January 2025)