🚨 Very happy to see our working paper “ The Carbon Content of Billionaire Wealth: Composition, Concentration, and Taxation ”, co-authored with Krystian Bua, Matteo Coronese, Chiara Marino, Elisa Palagi, and Andrea Roventini, out as a Working Paper.
In the paper, we ask a simple question: How large are billionaires’ carbon footprints? 💵 🏭
To answer it, we build a new dataset linking the asset portfolios of the world’s top 501 billionaires to firm- and asset-level greenhouse gas emissions, using an ownership-based emissions accounting framework.
A few key results:
* Every USD million held by billionaires is associated with more than 65 tCO₂e per year — around 10 times the annual footprint of the average person.
* Emissions are even more concentrated than wealth: around 50 billionaires account for roughly three-quarters of total emissions in our sample.
* Differences in emissions are driven mainly by investment choices, not simply by the size of fortunes.
* Publicly traded equity plays a disproportionate role and the highest-emitting billionaires derive a substantial share of their emissions from hard-to-abate sectors.
* We also compare alternative tax schemes and show that a progressive carbon wealth tax can potentially achieve three objectives: progressively taxing billionaires to curb inequality, targeting the most polluting activities, and raising substantial resources for a just transition.
Many thanks to Lucas Chancel, Yannick Rehm, Andrea Coronese, the FIND ERC Project research group, Demetrio Guzzardi, and the participants of LISIT 2025, the 37th EAEPE Annual Conference, the 66th SIE Annual Scientific Meeting, the 14th IAERE Annual Conference, the Sant’Anna Inequality Workshop, and the 3rd World Inequality Conference for the fruitful comments and suggestions.
Working paper here: https://lnkd.in/e3U5BfdG
#CarbonInequality #WealthInequality #Billionaires #Taxation #JustTransition #ClimateEconomics