On 14 July 2021, the European Commission formally adopted a proposal for a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism to mitigate the risk of carbon leakage caused by its increasingly ambitious environmental policies. There is a gap between the ways in which this issue is discussed in political spheres and the evidence provided by economic literature on it. The aim of this paper is to bridge this gap by presenting the context and policy debate surrounding carbon leakage and CBAs in the EU, reviewing the state of the economic literature on this topic, and discussing further research that is necessary to answer remaining policy concerns and unresolved research questions.