We explore whether mayors supported by pro-environmental parties enhance local environmental outcomes compared to their non-environmental counterparts. We study close elections within a regression discontinuity design and find a notable rise in recycling rates in Italian municipalities governed by pro-environmental coalitions. This uptick becomes far less pronounced when adopting broader criteria to define green mayoral candidates. Crucially, the enhanced recycling rates are not realized through augmented budgets for environmental initiatives or waste collection, but rather are primarily attributed to the implementation of local policies, such as on-call waste collection and the establishment of waste collection centers.
This paper improves our understanding of how rainwater impacts economic growth by investigating the effects of overlooked properties of the water cycle. First, we consider the natural separation of rainwater into flows of blue water (i.e., the water that runs off towards rivers) and green water (i.e., that remaining in the soil). Second, we account for the presence of surface and groundwater stocks. These considerations allow us to comprehensively address the whole partition of rainwater, which, upon reaching the ground, splits into distinct water resources that determine water availability inland. Our analyses on a global panel coupling sub-national economic and hydrological data show that rainwater does increase growth, but do so differently depending on its partition. Specifically, blue water leads to more economic growth than green water at the margin, but, because two thirds of terrestrial water is green, the latter contributes more to growth in total. By missing this crucial partition, we find that commonly used rainwater measurements overstate rainwater’s contribution to growth (by about two). Our analyses further indicate that, although groundwater reserves always mitigate the impacts of rainwater reduction on growth, surface water reserves sometimes amplify regional dependence to rainwater (depending on sector, income and reserve types).
Does saving behavior reveal socially relevant intertemporal preferences? People concerned about the next generation as such might assign welfare weights on other dynasties. These concerns are captured in a model of saving by decomposing the present generation’s preference for the next into its dynastic and cross-dynastic components. With such preferences, saving for one’s descendants benefits present members of other dynasties if they also care cross-dynastically. These preference externalities imply that socially relevant intertemporal preferences cannot be inferred from saving behavior and that utility discount rates revealed by saving behavior should be lowered. The external effect of present saving also decreases over time, implying that intertemporal preferences inferred from saving behavior are time-inconsistent.