On the nonlinear effects of energy consumption, economic growth, and tourism on carbon footprints in the USA

The present paper implements the quantile autoregressive lagged (QARDL) approach of Cho et al. (2015) and the Granger causality in quantiles tests of Troster et al. (2018) to explore the nonlinear effects of US energy consumption, economic growth, and tourist arrivals on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission. Our results unveil the existence of substantial reversion to the long-run equilibrium connectedness between the variables of interest and CO₂ emissions. The outcomes show that tourist arrivals decrease CO₂ emissions in the long term for each quantile. In addition, we found that the output growth positively influences the carbon emissions at lower quantiles but negatively influences the carbon emissions at upper quantiles. Moreover, our findings of short-term dynamics validate an asymmetric short-run effect of tourist arrivals and economic growth on CO₂ emissions in the US economy. Further results and their corresponding policy implications are discussed.