Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

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.

We investigate the effects of a climatic shock on individuals’ tax deduction and tax payable patterns, alongside their income dynamics. Using individual-level annual tax return data and exploiting the 2010–2011 Queensland Floods in Australia as a natural experiment, we find that the floods affect different income groups differently. They also lead to persistent higher tax deductions for high-income taxpayers. For the population at large, we detect spikes in certain tax deduction items that lasted longer than the income shock. Overall, our findings uncover discernible changes in tax deduction patterns following floods.

Finding ways to encourage collective action in contexts where only a minority adopts the desired behavior is central to solving many of today’s global environmental problems. We study how correcting people’s beliefs about social norms and behavioral trends encourages collective action in a setting where the desired behavior is not yet prevalent. In a field experiment, we test whether low sign-up rates for a recycling program in urban Peru can be increased by providing information (1) that most people regard participation in the program as important, i.e., on the “injunctive norm”, (2) on an increasing recent trend in sign-up rates. We find that the effectiveness of the treatments depends on people’s prior beliefs: Correcting inaccurate beliefs increases sign-up decisions significantly among people who either substantially underestimate the injunctive norm or who underestimate the positive trend. As this sub-group of people is in the minority in our set-up, we do not observe statistically significant average treatment effects. We further find that the effects of the treatments increase in the level of underestimation. Our evidence demonstrates that belief updating can be used effectively to encourage collective action where it is weak as long as a meaningful number of people underestimates the relevant trends and norms.

This study examines the effects of domestic environmental regulations on import activity. Using a panel of firm-product-level data and variations in regulatory stringency across products established by China’s Eleventh Five-Year Plan for Environmental Protection (covering 2006–2010), it reveals that tougher regulations on emission-intensive industries at home led to increases in downstream manufacturers’ imports of emission-intensive intermediate inputs. Specifically, a 1% increase in sulfur dioxide emission intensity resulted in a 0.026% increase in intermediate imports after the implementation of the regulation. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that, although the regulation increased emissions in source countries, it reduced global emissions of sulfur oxides and carbon dioxide. This is because the increases in imports caused by the regulation mainly came from countries with lower emission intensity than China. The regulation did not disproportionately increase imports from or emissions in developing countries.

Wholesale electricity prices can rapidly change in real-time, yet households usually face fixed-price electricity tariffs. In markets with large amounts of solar electricity generation, households that predominantly import energy in the daytime when wholesale prices are low implicitly cross-subsidize households with energy use that is more weighted to the higher-priced evening. We map substation data on electricity use to demographic data, to identify the household characteristics associated with this cross-subsidization in a high-solar setting. We find that households in areas with low house prices and high levels of renters are the net funders of this implicit subsidy. These households currently have the lowest average energy cost for retailers to service, and could be the greatest immediate beneficiaries if real-time retail tariffs are made available, before accounting for price-responsiveness. Finally, we present evidence that cross-subsidy magnitudes have grown significantly in recent years, coincident with rapid solar generator penetration.