Conference Agenda

Carbon pricing is a key policy tool for mitigating climate change by increasing prices and thereby reducing demand for carbon-intensive products and activities. However, behavioral effects—such as crowding in or out of intrinsic motivation, moral licensing, or defiant behavior—can either amplify or weaken its standalone price effect. This study examines these behavioral effects of carbon pricing on fuel consumption using a multiple price list approach in an incentivized online survey experiment. The findings provide indicative evidence that carbon price salience crowds in intrinsic motivation, reinforcing the price effect, while certain sub-groups seem to exhibit defiant reactions that weaken it.

In this paper, we analyze whether providing information about co-benefits of carbon taxes increases public support for carbon taxes not only in a Western but also in a non-Western industrialized country. Based on representative samples with more than 23,000 observations from Germany and Japan, our results show that the provision of co-benefit information significantly increases support for specific carbon taxes by between 2.7 and 4.6 percentage points in Germany and by between 8.4 and 11.8 percentage points in Japan. In addition, providing co-benefit information can turn previously significant (insignificant) price and revenue use effects on support insignificant (significant). Thus, providing co-benefit information not only directly increases support, but also widens the scope for implementing carbon taxes.

This article examines the relationship between climate change awareness, environmental concern and support for climate mitigation and environmental policies across 30 countries, using data collected from 2019 to 2022. Drawing on repeated cross-sectional surveys, we combine factor analysis and structural equation modelling to investigate the role of macro-level aspects associated with country specificities, e.g. the level of economic development and the regulatory quality, on the link between awareness, concern and policy support. We consider also factors at the microlevel, i.e. traditional drivers associated to citizens’ sociodemographic profiles. Our findings show that while awareness and concern about climate change are widespread, these attitudes do not consistently lead to stronger support for climate mitigation and environmental policies and people’s attitudes are significantly influenced by their country’s stage of development. Notably, support for climate and environmental policies decreases in wealthier nations, potentially due to long-standing environmental regulations and perceived economic costs. Conversely, lower-income and upper-middle income countries exhibit stronger support for such policies, possibly due to fewer established environmental frameworks and more immediate challenges. These results hold under various specifications and highlight the variability in public support for climate action, shaped by both economic conditions and policy histories, challenging the assumption that higher awareness and concern automatically lead to increased policy backing.

E-bike subsidies are growing in popularity globally. Evaluating their cost effectiveness w.r.t. reducing car driving emissions is more complicated than for other durable green goods since E-bike owners might not substitute away from driving. We evaluate the cost effectiveness of a Swedish subsidy program in 2018 by combining administrative, insurance, car registry and survey data. We find a complete passthrough of the subsidy to consumers, which incentivized a near doubling of E-bike sales. For the 90,000 individuals in our subsidy sample, we find however only a small substitution from driving based on registry estimates, much smaller than reported in surveys of subsidy recipients. The cost of carbon would have to be an unreasonable $800 per ton for the program to be cost effective. We also address additionality, coincidental benefits and alternative E-bike subsidy designs that can be more cost effective.