Global warming and Climate change are now widely recognized as two of the most important issues facing human society. Thus, the determinants of CO 2 emissions have attracted many researchers over the past few decades. One of the important factors is the democracy level of a country. Most of studies, however, ignore the possibility that effect of democracy on CO 2 emissions could vary throughout the CO 2 emissions distribution. In this paper, we address this issue by applying panel quantile regression methods. Our results show that the effect of democracy on CO 2 emissions is higher heterogeneous across conditional distribution of pollution. The coefficient is highly significant and has the positive sign at lower quantiles. Yet the magnitude decreases toward the higher quantiles and then it becomes insignificant. However, it turns into negative and becomes significant again at the higher quantile. In addition, financial openness is not statistically significant at any quantile. These novel findings not only help advance the existing literature, but also can be of special interest to policy makers.
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