preferences for energy efficiency vs renewables how much does a ton of co2 emissions cost concerns about climate change are growing and so is the demand for information about the costs and benefits of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions this paper seeks to estimate the benefits of climate change mitigation as measured by the public s willingness to pay for such policies we investigate the preferences of italian and czech households towards climate change mitigation policy options directly related to residential energy use we use discrete choice experiments which are administered in a standardized fashion to representative samples in the two countries through computer assisted web interviews our preferred estimates of the willingness to pay per ton of co2 emissions avoided is 133 for the italians and 94 euro for the czech respondents at 2014 purchasing power parity we find evidence of considerable heterogeneity in wtp driven by income the two samples differ in their within sample income elasticities of wtp but comparison across the two countries suggests an income elasticity of wtp of one or even greater than one for certain mixed logit specifications

the influence of collective action on the demand for voluntary climate change mitigation in hypothetical and real situations in this experiment we investigate determinants of the individual demand for voluntary climate change mitigation subjects decide between a cash prize and an allowance from the eu emissions trading scheme for one ton of co2 that will be deleted afterwards we vary the incentives of the decision situation in which we distinguish between real monetary incentives and a hypothetical decision situation with and without a cheap talk script furthermore decisions were implemented either as purely individual or as a collective action using majority voting we observe a significant hypothetical bias in the demand for voluntary climate change mitigation in case of the individual decision situation this bias is caused solely by subjects with low income collective decision making affects demand positively in the hypothetical decision situation only

willingness to pay for voluntary climate action and its determinants field experimental evidence the determinants of individual voluntary climate action vca in combating climate change and its potential scale are frequently debated in public but largely underresearched we provide estimates of the willingness to individually reduce eu greenhouse gas emissions by one ton using the european union emissions trading scheme estimates are derived from an online field experiment with a large highly heterogenous and internet representative sample of voting aged germans jointly estimating willingness to pay wtp non indifference to vca and prior knowledge we uncover important determinants of preferences for vca such as education the information structure among the population and exogenous environmental conditions

testing for the survey mode effect on contingent valuation data quality a case study of web based versus in person interviews this paper addresses the lack of empirical evaluation of the use of web based surveys in the context of contingent valuation surveys we compare using a case study in person interviews with web based surveys regarding response rate information additivity effects and respondents attitudes towards paying the web based survey had a much lower response 5 1 than the in person interviewing 84 we find the web based contingent valuation surveys to be neither more susceptible to information additivity effects nor more prone to zero protest responses we conclude in favor of the use of web based surveys namely in portugal where the number of internet users is rapidly increasing although further research efforts are required on their use

predicting consumer demand responses to carbon labels abstract providing carbon footprint labels for all food products is a daunting and potentially infeasible project knowing how consumers substitute away from high carbon goods and what they choose as substitutes is essential for understanding which goods are likely to result in meaningful reductions in carbon emissions this paper proposes a model to systematically estimate how consumers will respond to information from a carbon footprint label our model uses consumers value of their individual carbon footprint with own and cross price elasticities of demand data on carbon emissions from life cycle analysis to simulate shifts in consumer demand for 42 food products and a non food composite and subsequent changes in carbon emissions from different labeling schemes our simulation results have several findings including 1 carbon labels can reduce emissions but labeling only some items could lead to perverse impacts where consumers substitute away from labeled goods to unlabeled goods with a higher carbon footprint 2 carbon labels can inform consumers such that their previous beliefs about carbon footprints matter and 3 carbon labels on alcohol and meat would achieve the largest decreases in carbon emissions among the 42 food products studied

yes in my backyard spatial differences in the valuation of forest services and local co benefits for carbon markets in mexico forests provide many and large benefits including cost efficient climate change mitigation however international carbon markets have not stimulated the demand for forestry offsets domestic market mechanisms are emerging in many countries and forests could be highly valued through these policies as most of the benefits produced by forests are enjoyed locally here a choice experiment explores drivers of valuation and willingness to pay for forest carbon services in voluntary markets in mexico by comparing the valuation of citizens from four regions to test geographical preference for projects n 645 findings from multinomial logit models show valuation of forest carbon services is transferable and citizens would pay more for offsets from projects closer to their homes proximate forests provide a range of co benefits to local users including environmental services and opportunities for recreation factors related to valuation include sense of responsibility previous knowledge of carbon emissions previous visits to the sites regional identification and the valuation of local environmental services e g improvements in local air quality knowledge of spatial heterogeneity in valuation of the use of forest services can help to design market based instruments by identifying highly valued areas for environmental services programs and carbon markets

studying optimal paternalism illustrated by a model of sin taxes the classical economic approach to policy analysis assumes that people always respond optimally to the costs and benefits of their available choices a great deal of evidence suggests however that in some contexts people make errors that lead them not to behave in their own best interests economic policy prescriptions might change once we recognize that humans are humanly rational rather than superhumanly rational and in particular it may be fruitful for economists to study the possible advantages of paternalistic policies that help people make better choices we propose an approach for studying optimal paternalism that follows naturally from standard assumptions and methods of economic theory write down assumptions about the distribution of rational and irrational types of agents about the available policy instruments and about the government s information about agents and then investigate which policies achieve the most efficient outcomes in other words economists ought to treat the analysis of optimal paternalism as a mechanism design problem when some agents might be boundedly rational this approach has many advantages first and foremost by explicitly addressing when and how people do and don t pursue their own best interests economists will be better able to contribute to policy debates to contribute to debates over regulating private financial decisions we must study whether financial decisions are based on fallacious statistical reasoning and whether self control problems lead people to borrow too heavily to contribute to debates over teenage smoking we must study whether teenagers become smokers against their long run best interest economists will and should be ignored if we continue to insist that it is axiomatic that constantly trading stocks or accumulating consumer debt or becoming a heroin addict must be optimal for the people doing these things merely because they have chosen to do it a second advantage of our approach is that it forces us to look for the best feasible policy our

ethical differentiation and market behavior an experimental approach abstract does ethical differentiation of products affect market behavior we examined this issue in triopolistic experimental markets where producers set prices one producer s costs were higher than the others in two treatments the additional costs were attributed to compliance with ethical guidelines in the third no justification was provided many consumers reduced their experimental gains by purchasing the ethically differentiated products at higher prices individual differences were important business economics students paid smaller premia finally we speculate about the observed demand function for ethics and emphasize using experimental methodology to complement empirical studies in assessing markets for ethically differentiated products

loads of green washing can behavioural economics increase willingness to pay for efficient washing machines in the uk the eu energy efficiency labelling scheme has successfully increased demand for efficient appliances by providing a prominent letter rating to consumers during their product search behavioural economics be suggests the adoption of efficient appliances could be accelerated further by i monetising efficiency ii directly communicating the link between efficiency and carbon emissions iii communicating the long term e g operational life financial and environmental impact of product choices and iv framing the information as avoided losses extra rather than gains savings this study tested these hypotheses via an online stated preference survey of 465 uk residents using actual market pricing and efficiency data for washing machines the provision of information about either running costs or running emissions did encourage selection of more expensive and efficient products strongly correlated variables in the choice set and actual market p 001 r 30 41 with no statistically significant difference between their impact providing lifetime running cost information also nudged respondents towards more expensive efficient products than annual information p 006 027 r 15 18 finally loss framed running emissions information encouraged selection of more expensive efficient products than gain framed information p 05 r 13 16 the eu label is an impracticable means of communication but digital communication channels e g price comparison websites may offer potential for inexpensive localisation and personalisation of the information the results suggest that successful communication could benefit the private sector whilst making a contribution to reducing carbon emissions

a stated preference valuation of the non market benefits of pollination services in the uk using a choice experiment survey this study examines the uk public s willingness to pay to conserve insect pollinators in relation to the levels of two pollination service benefits maintaining local produce supplies and the aesthetic benefits of diverse wildflower assemblages willingness to pay was estimated using a bayesian mixed logit with two contrasting controls for attribute non attendance exclusion and shrinkage the results suggest that the uk public have an extremely strong preference to avoid a status quo scenario where pollinator populations and pollination services decline total willingness to pay was high and did not significantly vary between the two pollination service outputs producing a conservative total of 379m over a sample of the tax paying population of the uk equivalent to 13 4 per uk taxpayer using a basic production function approach the marginal value of pollination services to these attributes is also extrapolated the study discusses the implications of these findings and directions for related future research into the non market value of pollination and other ecosystem services

good intentions pave the way to the local moneylender abstract access to microfinance entails a risk of over indebtedness a naive present biased micro borrower may roll over debt after failure of an investment project financed with an mfi loan even though she planned not to do so and would not have taken the mfi loan if she had been aware of the time inconsistency of her plan similarly she may use a new loan to repay and end up over indebted if she discounts the future too strongly relative to her true preferences

do environmental benefits matter evidence from a choice experiment among house owners in germany residential buildings strongly contribute to global co2 emissions due to the high energy demand for electricity and heating particularly in industrialised countries within the eu decentralised heat generation is of particular relevance for future climate policy as its emissions are not covered by the eu ets we conducted a choice experiment concerning energy retrofits for existing houses in germany in the experiment the approximately 400 sampled house owners could either choose a modern heating system or an improved thermal insulation for their home we used standard and mixed logit specifications to analyse the choice data we found environmental benefits to have a significant impact on choices of heating systems however they played no role in terms of insulation choices based on the estimated mixed logit model we further obtained willingness to pay wtp measures for co2 savings

microcredit and mechanism design individual microcredit loans are not necessarily simple fixed debt obligations but rather may have contingencies and procedures suggested by the theory of mechanism design further group or joint liability lending may not be the single miracle cure practitioners claim nor operate the way the logic of a single theory might suggest there are multiple theories these theories can be distinguished in data on repayment rates and the best fit theory may vary with the environment finally the debate about whether to lend to individuals or lend to groups may be misplaced under simple theories of selection the pareto superior regime which is predicted to emerge varies with exogenous environmental characteristics jel d5 d82 g2 o17

preferences for distributional impacts of climate policy what role do people think distributional aspects should play in the design of climate policy the literature assessing climate policies has shown that assumptions regarding peoples distributional preferences for climate change policy impacts are central for policy assessment but empirical evidence for such preferences is lacking we design a discrete choice experiment that varies how climate policies affect the income of future generations living in three geographical regions with distinctly different current and predicted future income levels the experiment is implemented on a sample of the danish population and preferences are modelled in a latent class model our results show that a small majority of the sample 60 hold preferences consistent with inequity aversion with respect to future income effects of climate policies across regions for the same group we find that preferences for co benefits for current generations reflect a form of altruism but not inequity aversion in both cases the altruistic aspects are moderated by an element of preferences for positive outcomes in own region too the remaining classes display preferences with a varying focus on impacts in their own region or simply no support for further climate policy our results provide some support for the inclusion of social preferences regarding distributional effects of climate change policies in policy assessments and hence for the significant impact on policy this inclusion will have

the demand for environmental quality in driving transitions to low polluting energy sources the purpose of this paper is to understand the long run demand for energy related environmental quality its influence on legislation and on transitions to low polluting energy sources it starts by presenting a simple framework of the relationship between the demand for and supply of environmental quality environmental legislation and energy this forms the structure for presenting a series of episodes in british history where a demand for improvements in energy related environmental quality existed this analysis proposes that markets can drive transitions to low polluting energy sources in specific economic conditions however most probably governments will need to push them and this cannot be expected without strong and sustained demand for environmental improvements yet while demand is a prerequisite it is not enough it must also be spearheaded by strong creative and sustained pressure groups i e powerful lobbying and the weakening of the counter lobby to introduce legislation to enforce it and to avoid it being over turned by future governments

altruism moral norms and social approval joint determinants of individual offset behavior we provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of individual offset behavior with environmental offsets as a specific form of voluntary public good provision while existing theoretical models on the voluntary provision of public goods usually focus exclusively on single motivations for individual contributions we explicitly account for various motivations in a unified framework drawing on theories for public good provision such as pure and impure altruism internalized norms and social approval such an approach is particularly useful when individual offset behavior is heterogeneous the applicability of our theoretical framework is supported by data from a choice experiment on voluntary carbon offsetting in switzerland and the usa we find that willingness to pay for offsets mainly depends on an individual s internalized norms to avoid environmental degradation as well as partly on income the probability to offset instead is better explained by an individual s expected social recognition for offsetting

choice modelling approaches a superior alternative for environmental valuation in this paper we examine some popular choice modelling approaches to environmental valuation which can be considered as alternatives to more familiar valuation techniques based on stated preferences such as the contingent valuation method a number of choice modelling methods are consistent with consumer theory and its focus on an attribute based theory of value permits a superior representation of many environmental management contexts however choice modelling surveys can place a severe cognitive burden upon respondents and induce satisficing rather than maximising behavioural patterns in this framework we seek to identify the best available choice modelling alternative and investigate its potential to solve some of the major biases associated with standard contingent valuation we then discuss its use in the light of policy appraisal needs within the eu an application to the demand for rock climbing in scotland is provided as an illustration

willingness to pay for carbon offset certification and co benefits among high flying young adults in the uk voluntary carbon offsets represent a growing share of the carbon market as a whole and have the potential to contribute to meeting greenhouse gas emissions targets and reducing anthropogenic climate change certain offset project types may also deliver co benefits including safeguarding or promoting biodiversity supporting human development and poverty reduction and enabling market and technology development in low carbon sectors these co benefits might encourage consumers to participate in the voluntary offset market depending on their effects both on consumers willingness to pay wtp for offsets and on implementation costs however the offset market is not yet sufficiently developed to give a clear indication of consumer wtp for offsets with varying attributes this exploratory stated preference study therefore uses a choice experiment to estimate wtp for certified and uncertified offsets with or without these specific co benefits in an aviation context it is to the best of our knowledge the first to do so our results suggest that uptake of voluntary offsets may be encouraged by investing in projects with co benefits and by emphasising those co benefits to consumers they also suggest that certification regimes will add value to offsets helping compensate for increased costs provided that consumers are made fully aware of them

contingent valuation controversies and evidence contingent valuation cv has become one of the most widely used non market valuation techniques cv s prominence is due to its flexibility and ability to estimate total value including passive use value its use and the inclusion of passive use value in benefit cost analyses and environ mental litigation are the subject of a contentious debate this paper discusses key areas of the debate over cv and the validity of passive use value we conclude that many of the alleged problems with cv can be resolved by careful study design and implementation we further conclude that claims that empirical cv findings are theoretically inconsistent are not generally supported by the literature the debate over cv however has clarified several key issues related to nonmarket valuation and can provide useful guidance both to cv practitioners and the users of cv results

classifying carbon credit buyers according to their attitudes towards and involvement in cdm sustainability labels abstract carbon markets are increasingly conscious of the social and environmental quality of credits delivered by cdm projects consequently carbon credits are no longer viewed as a homogenous good and buyers now differentiate between credits supplied by different types of cdm project the objective of this paper is to classify cer buyers according to their attitudes towards and preferences for cdm sustainability labels k means clustering was used to segment a sample of buyers into two clusters the results indicate that two clear clusters exist with distinct profile patterns moreover the results of discriminant analysis confirmed that the two cluster solution was valid finally the results of the chi square analysis and a cross tabulation showed that these two clusters were significantly different in organization type level of paid up capital perception of sustainable development benefits perception of return on investment perception of image of the sustainability labeling participation in the voluntary market the project priority knowledge in the sustainability label attitude towards the host country s duty and their willingness to pay

policy v individual heterogeneity in the benefits of climate change mitigation evidence from a stated preference survey abstract we use stated preference methods to investigate the public s preferences for decarbonization policies we ask three research questions first does the willingness to pay wtp for each ton of co2 emissions reductions depend on the policies and on individual characteristics of the respondents second how extensive is the variation associated with these factors third what factors affect support for or opposition to a carbon tax based on the responses to discrete choice experiments from a sample of italians we find that the wtp per ton of co2 ranges between zero and 230 the variation associated with the policy instrument is approximately of the same order of magnitude as that associated with individual characteristics of the respondents

micro credit initiatives for equitable and sustainable development who pays abstract there is a growing acknowledgement that micro credit programs have potential for equitable and sustainable development however my anthropological research on the micro credit program of the grameen bank shows that bank workers are expected to increase disbursement of loans among their members and press for high recovery rates to earn profit necessary for economic viability of the institution to ensure timely repayment in the loan centers bank workers and borrowing peers inflict an intense pressure on women clients in the study community many borrowers maintain their regular payment schedules through a process of loan recycling that considerably increases the debt liability on the individual households increases tension and frustration among household members produces new forms of dominance over women and increases violence in society

can defaults save the climate evidence from a field experiment on carbon offsetting programs individual preferences for environmental policies can be influenced by the frame in which choices and decisions are presented in this paper we present results of a field experiment on the contributions to carbon offsetting programs under two alternative treatments for the default option the opt in treatment asked subjects to pay for the policy proposal while the opt out treatment asked subjects if they wanted to be excluded from payment for the policy proposal the results show that the frame of the default option had a significant effect on the amount of money paid for the policy proposal subjects were more likely to accept the policy proposal if the default option was the opt out treatment the results have implications for the design of environmental policies

stated versus revealed knowledge determinants of offsetting co2 emissions from fuel consumption in vehicle use abstract this paper examines the role of prior knowledge in offsetting co2 emissions from fuel consumption in vehicle use the main result of our econometric analysis on the basis of unique representative data from drivers license holders in the usa and germany refers to the strong discrepancy between the stated and revealed knowledge of co2 offsetting the revealed knowledge measured by the correct estimation of the costs for this offsetting practice has a positive impact on the stated purchase of corresponding offsetting credits in both countries in contrast the effect of the stated knowledge of offsetting is not robust and in some cases even negative surprisingly it cannot even be confirmed that drivers license holders who claim that they are more than sufficiently informed estimate these costs more accurately

accounting for mismatch unemployment we investigate unemployment due to mismatch in the us over the past three decades we propose an accounting framework that allows us to estimate the overall amount of mismatch unemployment as well as the contribution of each of the frictions that caused the mismatch mismatch is quantitatively important for unemployment and the cyclical behavior of mismatch unemployment is very similar to that of the overall unemployment rate geographic mismatch is driven primarily by wage frictions mismatch across industries is driven by wage frictions as well as barriers to job mobility we nd virtually no role for worker mobility frictions

how carbon offsetting scheme impacts the duopoly output in production and abatement analysis in the context of carbon cap and trade abstract in the context of addressing climate change the carbon emission trading scheme has become one of the main measures adopted by many countries and regions to achieve emission reduction goals noticing this current lack of research based on a duopoly model this paper quantitatively explores the impact of carbon offsetting scheme on both emission trading participants profits and industry s output by drawing on advanced experience of carbon offsetting scheme from developed countries such as us switzerland and eu and thus provides a perspective for government to design optimal aggregate standard for carbon cap and trade results show a negative correlation between enterprises carbon intensity and their equilibrium output in the product market and indicate a threshold for the relative magnitude of the duopoly enterprises carbon intensity above which their absolute output will differ dramatically the incorporation of carbon offsetting scheme into a non offset quota trading scheme will reduce its equilibrium carbon price thereby mitigate its negative impact on industry s total output in the product market by an either linear or quadratic form depending on the design for the proportion ceiling of offsetting quota

offsetting versus mitigation activities to reduce hbox co _ 2 emissions a theoretical and empirical analysis for the u s and germany this paper studies the voluntary provision of public goods that is partially driven by a desire to offset for individual polluting activities we first extend existing theory and show that offsets allow a reduction in effective environmental pollution levels while not necessarily extending the consumption of a polluting good we further discuss the impact of an increased environmental preference on purchases of offsets and mitigation activities several theoretical results are then econometrically tested using a novel dataset on activities to reduce hbox co 2 emissions for the case of vehicle purchases in the u s and germany we show that environmental preference triggers the stated use of hbox co 2 offsetting and mitigation channels in both countries however we find strong country differences for the stated purchase of hbox co 2 offsets while such activities are mainly triggered by a high general awareness of the climate change problem in the u s the perception that road travel is responsible for hbox co 2 emissions to a large extent is more important for driver s license holders in germany

recreation demand models with taste differences over people we estimate random parameter logit models of anglers choice of fishing site the models generalize logit by allowing coefficients to vary randomly over anglers rather than being fixed the models do not exhibit the restrictive independence from irrelevant alternatives property of logit and can represent any substitution pattern estimation explicitly accounts for the fact that the variation in coefficients over anglers induces correlation in unobserved utility over trips by the same angler willingness to pay for improved fish stock and the value to anglers of specific sites are calculated from the models and compared with the estimates obtained from a standard logit model

the demand for climate protection empirical evidence from germany abstract an experiment designed to find the real demand for climate protection was conducted among a sample of the residential population in mannheim germany participants were offered the opportunity to contribute to climate protection by purchasing european union allowances which were then withdrawn from the european emissions trading scheme our experiment showed a median willingness to pay wtp of zero and a mean wtp of approximately 12 t co 2

train travel passengers willingness to pay to offset their co2 emissions in korea abstract due to the upsurge in concerns regarding climate change the carbon market has been growing more rapidly than ever recently a more innovative and experimental voluntary carbon market has been playing a supplementary role to the compliance market which is lacking in flexibility and diversity and has been accounting for an increasingly larger portion of the carbon market among the efforts to accumulate data and develop appropriate policies for the voluntary carbon market it is necessary to analyze the benefits of carbon offsets for ghg emissions from railways this study attempts to apply contingent valuation cv to measure the public s willingness to pay wtp for voluntary carbon offsets vcos from railway travel in korea furthermore in order to enhance the statistical efficiency of the wtp estimation and reduce the response effect in the context of wtp elicitation this study employs a one and one half bound dichotomous choice format the estimate of the mean wtp for a vco program for a specific travel distance is estimated to be krw 1 345 usd 1 24 per person this quantitative information can be utilized to develop policies related to mitigating climate change

statistical approaches to the fat tail problem for dichotomous choice contingent valuation if a cumulative density function esti mated from dichotomous choice data has an unre alistically fat right hand tail mean willingness to pay wtp will be overestimated truncating the range of integration results in a lower bound esti mate of the true mean wtp a normalization pro cedure proposed by boyle welsh and bishop 1988 unnecessarily depresses the estimate further a new statistical approach is presented that allows a best guess estimate of mean wtp because this estimate involves extrapolation beyond the range of the data it tends to be highly variable jel q21