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on Resource Economics |
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Issue of 2017‒01‒01
four papers chosen by |
| By: | Cristiano Codagnone; Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri; Francesco Bogliacino; Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva; George Gaskell; Andriy Ivchenko; Pietro Ortoleva; Francesco Mureddu |
| Abstract: | This article presents the results of a laboratory experiment and an online multi-country experiment testing the effect of motor vehicle eco-labels on consumers. The laboratory study featured a discrete choice task and questions on comprehension, while the ten countries online experiment included measures of willingness to pay and comprehension. Labels focusing on fuel economy or running costs are better understood, and influence choice about money-related eco-friendly behaviour. We suggest that this effect comes through mental accounting of fuel economy. In the absence of a cost saving frame, we do not find a similar effect of information on CO2 emissions and eco-friendliness. Labels do not perform as well as promotional materials. By virtue of being embedded into a setting designed to capture the attention, the latter are more effective. We found also that large and expensive cars tend to be undervalued once fuel economy is highlighted. |
| Keywords: | Eco-label; Nudge; Willingness to pay; Fuel economy; Experiments; CO2 emission |
| JEL: | C9 D3 Q56 Q58 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:68683&r=res |
| By: | Coria, Jessica (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Zhang, Xiao-Bing (School of Economics, Renmin University of China.) |
| Abstract: | Road pricing can improve air quality by reducing and spreading traffic flows. Nevertheless, air quality does not depend only on traffic flows, but also on pollution dispersion. In this paper we investigate the effects of the temporal variation in pollution dispersion on optimal road pricing, and show that time-varying road pricing is needed to make drivers internalize the social costs of both time-varying congestion and time- varying pollution. To this end, we develop an ecological economics model that takes into account the effects of road pricing on integrated daily commuting patterns. We characterize the optimal road pricing when pollution dispersion varies over the day and analyze its effects on traffic flows, arrival times, and the number of commuters by car. |
| Keywords: | Air pollution; Road transportation; Road pricing; Pollution dispersion |
| JEL: | Q53 Q58 R41 R48 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0682&r=res |
| By: | Björk, Lisa (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Kocher, Martin (Department of Economics, LMU Munich); Martinsson, Peter (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Nam Khanh, Pham (School of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City University of Economics) |
| Abstract: | The return from investments in public goods is almost always uncertain, in contrast to the most common setup in the existing empirical literature. We study the impact of natural uncertainty on cooperation in a social dilemma by conducting a public goods experiment in the laboratory in which the marginal return to contributions is either deterministic, risky (known probabilities) or ambiguous (unknown probabilities). Our design allows us to make inferences on dierences in cooperative attitudes, beliefs, and one-shot as well as repeated contributions to the public good under the three regimes. Interestingly, we do not find that natural uncertainty has a significant impact on the inclination to cooperate, neither on the beliefs of others nor on actual contribution decisions. Our results support the generalizability of previous experimental results based on deterministic settings. From a behavioural point of view, it appears that strategic uncertainty overshadows natural uncertainty in social dilemmas. |
| Keywords: | Public good; conditional cooperation; experiment; uncertainty; risk; ambiguity |
| JEL: | C91 D64 D81 H41 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0683&r=res |
| By: | Joshua Graff Zivin; Matthew E. Kahn |
| Abstract: | How will a nation’s aggregate urban productivity be affected by climate change? The joint distribution of climate conditions and economic activity across a nation’s cities will together determine industrial average exposure to climate risk. Air conditioning (AC) can greatly reduce this heat exposure. We develop a simple model of air conditioning adoption by heterogeneous firms within an industry. Our analysis suggests that high productivity firms are more likely to adopt AC since they suffer larger productivity losses when it is hot. Given that the most productive firms produce a disproportionate share of industry-level output, we present aggregation results highlighting how the industry’s output is insulated from the heat. Our empirical analysis of the impacts of heat on total factor productivity in U.S manufacturing yields findings broadly consistent with our model’s predictions. |
| JEL: | L25 L6 O44 O47 Q54 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22962&r=res |