Conference Agenda

This paper shows for the first time the support for progressive carbon taxes and individual caps. It demonstrates how this support is linked with an aversion to intratemporal carbon footprint inequality and is thus likely to increase. To that end, it uses a survey representative of the French population.

A near majority supports progressive carbon taxes with uniform revenue redistribution. This support is much higher than for linear carbon taxes with a progressive revenue redistribution. This is true for all carbon tax bases that could be immediately implementable, — on gas, flights, and fuels. A near majority also favors individual flight caps.

Given sufficient progress in carbon accounting, respondents wish to include emissions associated with wealth, financial, and to a lesser extent, labor income in the definition of an individual carbon tax base. Using this footprint definition, we show that a near majority also supports a progressive carbon tax on top of a more progressive income tax, as well as individual carbon caps.

A tax reform model reveals how support for progressive carbon taxes and individual caps is influenced by ecologearian social welfare preferences. These preferences, –introduced in this paper–, express aversion to intra-temporal footprint inequality. Our survey shows that respondents are ecologearian, not utilitarian. Consistent with ecologearian preferences, information on footprint inequality increases support for progressive carbon taxes. Since this information comes from recently available statistics and media campaigns, this suggests a growing support for progressive carbon taxes in the future

Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) — a range of methods to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — are a crucial innovation in meeting temperature targets set by international climate agreements. However, mechanisms that undo the adverse consequences of short-sighted actions (such as NETs) can fuel substitution effects and crowd out virtuous behaviors (e.g., mitigation efforts). For this reason, the impact of NETs on environmental preservation is an open question among scientists and policy-makers. We model this problem through a novel restorable common-pool resource game and use a laboratory experiment to exogenously manipulate the key features of NETs and assess their consequences. We show that crowding out only emerges when NETs are surely available and cheap. The availability of NETs does not allow experimental communities to either conserve the common resource for longer or accrue higher earnings and makes the earnings distribution more unequal.

Social acceptance of decarbonization depends not only on distributional outcomes but also on workers’ understanding of the transition and its perceived implications for jobs, skills, and employment security. This study examines workers’ knowledge and beliefs about the energy transition and whether correcting misperceptions alters policy preferences. We fielded an online survey experiment with roughly 3,000 employed adults in Italy and the United States. Respondents first provided their views on the transition’s meaning, labor-market impacts, and worker policies, then were randomly assigned to a control group or to a treatment presenting OECD projections showing that overall employment remains stable under an accelerated transition.

We document substantial knowledge gaps and pessimism about job losses, particularly regarding own occupations and local labor markets. On average, providing aggregate employment information does not significantly affect support for decarbonization policies, willingness to sign pro-transition petitions, or prioritization of worker protection over climate action in either country. However, the information treatment does affect labor-market beliefs in Italy. Treated respondents revise downward expected wages in their own occupation and perceived job security in outside options. Moreover, the treatment narrows belief dispersion across workers with different priors: optimistic workers become less confident in regional job creation, while pessimistic workers become more optimistic, leaving average expectations unchanged.

These findings suggest that aggregate employment information alone is insufficient to shift climate policy support, but it meaningfully reshapes workers’ expectations about the distribution and location of labor-market adjustment during the energy transition.

Food waste is a major economic, social, and environmental problem, yet evidence on consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) to prevent food waste in incentivized settings remains limited. We study this question in an experiment that elicits WTP using a novel incentive-compatible mechanism. Participants make decisions for six food products, three basic and three luxury, in two treatments: saving food for personal consumption or saving food and donating it to a local food bank. The within-subject design allows us to compare self-interest and altruistic motivations while controlling for individual heterogeneity. We find that participants are generally willing to pay to prevent food waste, with substantial variation across products and treatments. WTP is significantly lower for luxury items when food is donated rather than consumed personally, whereas differences are smaller for basic food items. Female participants and individuals with higher measured altruism exhibit higher WTP, particularly in the food bank treatment. The results highlight the importance of altruism and perceived appropriateness in food waste prevention decisions.

How should a government design a carbon tax when it is not only concerned by mitigating carbon emissions, but also income redistribution? This article extends a dynamic Mirrlees taxation model, typically used to characterize optimal labor wedges and savings wedges, to study the optimal commodity wedge between two goods, one of which is polluting. First, starting with the basic case where there are two non-polluting goods, I derive the optimal commodity wedge with non-separable preferences in a dynamic environment. Second, in the case where one of the goods is polluting and pollution damages both output and utility, I derive a modified optimal carbon tax whose output damages component remains Pigouvian and whose utility damages component is distorted by the labor wedge as well as the gap in complementarity in utility between each good and labor supply. The optimal carbon tax is fully Pigouvian if the labor wedge is zero, if both goods are equally complementary with labor, or if utility is separable. Moreover, the structure of both the labor wedge and the savings wedge is unaffected by the presence of pollution, suggesting that a properly designed commodity wedge is fully capable of internalizing the externality while respecting the social planner's redistributive goals.

The poor have higher present biases and face higher interest rates, but in a simple model of lumpy investment, only the latter matter when deciding whether to invest in a green durable. Non-discriminating subsidies favor the rich, who are more likely to choose green durables, but they incentivize the poor more strongly. Only full subsidies (i.e., subsidies that fully compensate for the initial price difference between green and brown durables) can ensure full allocative efficiency and fairness. Such full subsidies induce the systematic choice of the green durable and are therefore not compatible with a positive private, social or environmental discount rate. The latter is defined as a social discount rate consistent with the net-zero target: it is lower than usual social discount rates, but is still positive in the presence of carbon capture technologies. Credit policies may ensure allocative efficiency and fairness over a wider range of situations.

Informality is widespread in emerging markets but seldom considered in climate policy design. First, this paper shows that informality has a theoretically ambiguous impact on optimal carbon pricing. Key is whether climate change exacerbates or mitigates informality distortions. Second, this paper empirically finds that tropical storms (but not daily temperatures) increase informal employment shares both within India and globally in lower-income countries. Finally, quantitative modeling estimates for India suggest that welfare costs of formal sector climate damages may be underestimated when their general equilibrium effects on informality are ignored.