Nicky Wills

My PhD research analyses the European Union Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (EU CBAM) through the lens of imperfect information, institutional capacity, and political economy. The central premise is that the EU CBAM, while motivated by environmental objectives, is also embedded in asymmetric global institutional contexts and may introduce systematic distortions due to its default emissions values and uneven reporting capabilities across firms and countries. 

A key contribution of the research is that it moves beyond the aggregated simulation-based approaches commonly used in the EU CBAM literature by working directly with the regulatory design of the EU CBAM and the emissions accounting framework underpinning it. Specifically, it quantifies the “information wedge” created when exporters are unable to provide verified emissions data and are thus assigned conservative default emissions values.