Abstract: China's twelfth five-year plan proposes that the establishment of volunteer emission reduction (VER) carbon market and good trading mechanism is required to underlie sustainable development of the market. This paper focuses on the influential factors of exchange price to discover price formation which is the core issue of exchange mechanism. First, theoretical analysis from three aspects including supply, demand and market effect is conducted. Then, the samples of carbon securities' exchange price (2003-2010) in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) are used to check impact factors by AR(1)-GARCH (1,1) model with panel regression. The research result shows that the primary impact factor of pricing in phaseⅠis quota supply and demand, and there is an upward tendency in the effect degree of different products. In phase Ⅱenergy price has a great effect and gas price becomes a significant factor. The result offers a good reference to the construction of voluntary carbon market in China.

Key words: voluntary market, carbon exchange, price impact factors, chicago carbon exchange