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The integration or segmentation of regional carbon prices implies that barriers may hinder prices from adjusting efficiently and impede linkages between regional carbon markets. Past studies have found that crossregional carbon prices in China tend to diverge, indicating unbalanced regional markets and that carbon cap-and-trade policies may be insufficiently effective. China's carbon trading pilots opened in 2013. Is the integration efficient? This is the research question addressed in this study. This paper uses the carbon prices of four carbon-trading pilot regions in China (i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Guangdong) over the period of January 1, 2014, to March 23, 2021, to explore whether prices are correlated across three dimensions: long-term convergence, short-term correlation, and volatility transmission by adopting a vector error correction model with heterogeneous variances. And by using longer-term daily data and empirical tests that can account for the multiple-faceted correlations, this paper provides evidence showing that long-term convergence and risk transfer between the four regional carbon prices exist, which indicates significant regional integration. The results indicate that the price behavior of the Beijing pilot is efficient and that the Shanghai pilot has the lowest volatility. The paper also documents an information transfer pattern. For example, the Beijing pilot is shown to be the leading risk transfer market, whereas the Shanghai pilot is shown to be the market where most risk is transferred. Contrary to findings elsewhere, our main results demonstrate that China's carbon markets exhibit integration efficiency and no imbalance between regions. This may be because the efficiency of China's carbon markets has improved over time. The evidence also implies that if a multi-dimensional correlation has not been considered, it may underestimate the efficiency of regional carbon prices' integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has established seven pilot carbon markets and has made efforts to establish a national carbon market. This paper constructs an AR-GARCH model and adopts bilaterally modified dummy variables to investigate the impacts of regulatory update events (allowance allocation plans and allowance auctions) on the pilot carbon markets in China. The pilots of Guangdong, Shanghai, and Hubei are chosen as case studies. We find that each pilot reacted differently to the same events due to mechanism design diversity. The allowance allocation plan in the Shanghai and Guangdong pilot markets generated relatively distinct influences on the carbon price. Furthermore, to a certain extent, allowance auctions played a role in carbon price discovery in Guangdong and Hubei. However, such an impact was not remarkable in the Shanghai pilot market. Based on the empirical results, policy recommendations are presented for the establishment of a national carbon market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]