Environmental and Resource Economics最新文献

This study focuses on green parties in government and analyzes the political economy of public spending for biodiversity and landscape protection, comparing it with other environmental and non-environmental spending categories. Using panel data covering 26 OECD economies during the sample period from 1995 to 2021, we employ an error-correction approach that effectively accounts for both the presence of stochastic trends in the data and the structure of public budgets. Our findings highlight significant differences in the political economy of biodiversity and landscape protection spending compared with other environmental expenditures. Firstly, while governments under the participation of green parties generally allocate more funds to other environmental issues, the same does not hold true for biodiversity. Secondly, growth rates of other environmental expenditures increase considerably during election periods, whereas expenditures dedicated to biodiversity and landscape protection tend to shrink. Thirdly, environmental expenditures are more procyclical in comparison with public spending for non-environmental purposes, where, however, under green parties in government the cyclicality of biodiversity and landscape protection expenditure is mitigated during periods of fiscal adjustments. These results underscore the importance of establishing enhanced and counter-cyclical funding mechanisms, bolstered by support from supranational organizations, to ensure continuous and effective preservation of biodiversity.

This paper investigates whether informative feedback on consumption can nudge water saving. We launched a five-month online information campaign which involved around 1,000 households located in the province of Milan (Italy) with a smart meter. A group of households received monthly reports via email on their per capita daily average water consumption, including a social comparison component. The Intention to Treat (ITT) analysis shows that, compared to a benchmark group, the units exposed to the intervention reduced their per capita water consumption by around 6% (25.8 liters per day or 6.8 gallons). Being able to observe the email opening rate, we find that the ITT effect is mainly driven by complying units. Through an Instrumental Variable approach, we estimated a Local Average Treatment Effect equal to 54.9 liters per day of water saving. A further Regression Discontinuity Design analysis shows that different feedback on consumption class size differentially affected water saving at the margin. We also found that the additional water saving increased with the number of monthly reports, though it did not persist two months after the campaign expired.

This paper analyses the effects of altruism on the formation of climate coalitions in the standard two-stage game of self-enforcing international environmental agreements with identical countries. Altruism implies that each country values, to some extent, every other country’s welfare when deciding on its coalition membership and emissions policy. In the Nash [Stackelberg] game, the fringe [coalition] countries exploit the altruism of the coalition [fringe] countries so that altruism decreases [increases] the coalition size. In any case, global emissions and global welfare are close to the non-cooperative values. However, altruism narrows the gap between the individually optimal emissions and the socially optimal emissions, so altruism increases global welfare. The effects of altruism on the formation of climate coalitions crucially depends on its modelling: If altruism affects the membership decision but not the policy decision, or if each coalition country is more altruistic toward other coalition countries than toward fringe countries, altruism can stabilise large coalitions up to the grand coalition. Finally, altruism can stabilise small coalitions but destabilises large coalitions with asymmetric countries.

With rising average temperatures and extreme heat events becoming more frequent, understanding the ramifications for cognitive performance is essential. I estimate the effect of outside air temperature on performance in mental arithmetic training games. Using data from 31,000 individuals and 1.15 million games played, I analyze frequent engagement in a cognitively challenging task in a non-stressful and familiar environment. I find that, above a threshold of 16.5 (^{circ })C, a 1 (^{circ })C increase in outside air temperature leads to a performance reduction of 0.13%. The effect is mostly driven by individuals living in relatively cold areas, who are less adapted to hot temperatures.

Adoption of low-carbon technology is key to mitigating climate change. A possible unwanted consequence of fast technological progress is that products get outdated before their technical lifetime is over. We investigate whether the market value of electric vehicles, characterized by rapid technological progress, declines faster over their lifetime than gasoline vehicles, which represent a mature technology. We use novel data from Norway, the market with the highest market shares for electric vehicles in the world. The data are from the largest web platform for secondhand vehicles over the period 2011–2021. Prices of electric vehicles decline faster than gasoline vehicles. This seems to be driven by the electric vehicles with below median driving range. We hypothesize that the large price drop is mainly due to the fast technological improvement of electric vehicles.

We analyse a model of environmental regulation where two firms can optimally decide to invest in an emission abatement technology and the regulator taxes firms’ emissions in a time-consistent manner. Depending on the values of the parameters measuring the extent of emission abatement that firms may achieve and the degree of product differentiation, we characterize the subgame perfect equilibria, developing all admissible scenarios where either both firms invest in abatement technologies, none of them do, or just one does, and show the conditions under which a win-win solution emerges, validating a strong form of Porter hypothesis. We also extend the main result to the oligopoly game with a generic number of firms.