Conference Agenda

Unpacking people’s self-rated life satisfaction to price environmental public

goods is promising to inform well-being-improving decisions. Yet, previous contri-

butions yield inconsistent estimates of the income-life satisfaction conversion rate,

leading to an overvaluation of non-market environmental goods. This paper devel-

ops and implements a new valuation framework for calculating the life satisfaction

shadow price for environmental goods in a two-step regression procedure. Using

restricted georeferenced longitudinal survey data on life satisfaction, we find that

the two-step valuation approach produces smaller shadow prices (with and with-

out instrumenting for income) compared to the individual-level valuation (one-step

regression). We provide strong empirical evidence that the overvaluation bias re-

ported in the existing life satisfaction literature can be largely explained by the

level of valuation rather than the endogeneity of income, as previously exposed in

the literature. Exploiting variations in labor demand shocks across industries in a

shift-share instrumental variable strategy, we demonstrate that although the instru-

mental variable approach significantly increases the size of the income coefficient,

the resulting shadow prices remain relatively similar to those obtained without in-

strumenting for income. We derive shadow prices for protected areas around 2.6

EUR per month/m2, and 0.20 EUR per month/m2 for open space.

Low public support often impedes more stringent environmental policies. But if policies are enacted, do they change individual preferences? Using surveys covering 38 countries around the world, we study the effect of exposure to environmental policies on policy preferences. Exploiting within-country-year, across birth-cohort variation, we document that cohorts exposed to more stringent policies in the past are more supportive of environmental policies at the time of the survey, with the effect largely driven by exposure during early adulthood. This relationship suggests that a society's environmental policy attitudes evolve endogenously, with implications for the frameworks we use to evaluate the normative appropriateness, predictability, and political economy of these measures.

Interventions to decrease meat consumption are often only implemented for short periods of time, and it is unclear how they might have lasting effects. We combine student canteen consumption (over 270,000 purchases made by over 4,500 guests) and survey data (N>800) to study how a one-month intervention to decrease meat consumption affects consumer behavior post-intervention. During the intervention period, meat meals were eliminated from the menu of the treatment canteen, while the two control canteens were unaffected. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we estimate that guests usually frequenting the treatment canteen did not significantly reduce their visits to the canteen during or after the intervention. In the two months following the intervention, they were still 4% less likely to choose the meat option when visiting the canteen, relative to baseline. A large part of this effect seems explicable with guests learning about the quality of the canteen's vegetarian meals and habit formation, while we find little to no evidence of the intervention changing perceived social norms.

Our paper addresses this gap and sheds light on the complex dynamics between a changing climate and collective behavior by conducting a large-scale investigation of the causal impact of extreme weather events on electoral outcomes (turnout and electoral preferences) in Italy from 2004 to 2022. Our results show that exposure to extreme weather events shortly before an election significantly decreases voter turnout in regional, national, and European elections, while increasing electoral participation in municipal elections. Additionally, we find that green parties gain electoral support relative to both left-wing and right-wing coalitions.