Who bears the cost of carbon pricing? Gender differentials in carbon footprint and distributional impact of carbon pricing across Europe

This paper examines the gendered distributional effects of carbon pricing across six European Union countries, focusing on differences in household carbon footprints and exposure to carbon-induced price increases. While prior research has primarily emphasized the income-based regressivity of carbon taxes (Maier et al., 2025), this study addresses the relative neglect of gender disparities in emissions patterns and welfare impacts.

The study employs a harmonised microsimulation framework combining two components. First, the Green-EUROMOD model integrates disposable income simulated through EUROMOD using EU-SILC microdata with detailed consumption profiles from the Household Budget Survey (Dreoni et al., 2025). Household-level greenhouse gas emissions are calculated by applying environmentally extended input-output CO2-per-euro emission intensities from EXIOBASE to harmonised consumption categories (EXIOBASE Consortium, 2015). This enables a distinction between direct emissions from home energy and transport fuels and indirect emissions embedded in goods and services, allowing a decomposition of gender differentials by emission source and supporting distributional analysis. Second, a demand system supports the welfare analysis of carbon pricing by linking consumption, emissions, price changes, and behavioural responses, following Creedy and Van De Ven (1997), Sologon et al. (2025) and Sologon et al. (2024). To assess distributional heterogeneity, we apply quantile functions and quantile regression techniques, examining how gender differences in carbon footprints and exposure to carbon-related price increases vary across income and emissions distributions and interact with household composition.

Preliminary results reveal systematic gender differences in emissions by source. Across countries, women-led households tend to exhibit higher emissions from heating and electricity. However, this gender gap declines with income: disparities are largest among lower-income households and narrow progressively at higher income levels. At the same time, home-energy emissions increase with income for all households, indicating that higher-income groups generate larger energy-related footprints even after controlling for observable characteristics. Evidence on transport-related emissions is more heterogeneous. In some countries (e.g. Germany, Finland, and Ireland), men-led households display higher motor fuel emissions, while in others (e.g. Portugal, Hungary, and Poland), women-led households emit more. Nevertheless, gender gaps in transport emissions generally decline along the income distribution, while overall emissions rise with income.

This study highlights that carbon pricing may interact with gendered consumption and energy-use patterns in complex ways. By identifying which groups are most exposed to price-based climate instruments, the paper aims to inform the design of compensatory measures that enhance equity without undermining environmental effectiveness.