What Happened to the CER Market? A Dynamic Linkage Effect Analysis

The certified emission reduction (CER) carbon trading market promoted by the clean development mechanism (CDM) has become an important platform for the development of the international carbon market. However, the CER carbon market has shown unsteady development with the present phenomena of price decrease, transaction inactivity, and recession. Against this backdrop, this study aims to explore the intuition behind CER price volatility from the new perspective of internal and external market dynamic linkages. By introducing three homogeneous carbon products of CER futures, namely, the daily dataset of CER spot, EUA (European Union Allowance) spot and EUA futures, and taking five heterogeneous market drivers comprising stock, exchange rates, coal, crude oil, and natural gas into account, we analyze the dynamic correlations and volatility spillovers between CER futures returns and these influencing factors using the DGC-MSV model. With sample data from January 2013 to May 2019, our empirical results show a persistent dynamic dependence between CER futures price and its factors. The homogeneous and heterogeneous markets have significant positive and negative spillover effects, respectively, on the CER futures market. The decline of CER futures price in the post-Kyoto era is due to two aspects: fluctuation of the exchange rate market, which is closely connected to the settlement of currency, and coal price volatility in energy markets. However, the CER futures market has no obvious spillover effect on other markets, except for its strong impact on the CER spot market and weak information spillover to the exchange rate market. Overall, this finding indicates the feeblest financial property of CER carbon futures market.