Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 01:51:12am WEST
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Daily Overview |
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Egg-Timer: Energy Demand and Behavior Location: D-111 Session Chair: Pranay Kumar, University College Dublin | |
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Climate Policy Uncertainty and Household Investments 1: RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Germany; 2: University of Mainz; 3: University of Bonn; 4: Technical University Dortmund This paper examines how uncertainty about future carbon prices shapes household beliefs and early investment behavior. In a large-scale experiment with German homeowners, participants receive expert forecasts for the 2030 carbon price that share the same mean (85 euros/t) but differ in precision: a narrow range (low uncertainty), a wide range (high uncertainty), or no forecast (control). This isolates the effect of forecast variance while holding expected prices constant. Wider forecast ranges produce more dispersed beliefs and heighten the salience of political and policy risk. Higher uncertainty also increases the willingness to pay for a professional energy audit by roughly 25 euros - a persistent shift consistent with greater perceived risk rather than higher expected returns. The evidence points to precautionary learning: when facing complex and partly irreversible decisions, households respond to uncertainty by acquiring information rather than acting immediately. Finally, we provide early evidence on the dynamic relationship between information acquisition and physical investment under uncertainty, showing that a greater willingness to learn does not necessarily translate into faster carbon abatement actions by households. | |