Conference Agenda

In this paper, we examine climate cognitive dissonance in Europe. Using data from more than thirty thousand individuals across Europe, we document a climate belief–action gap, or a divergence between beliefs about climate change and the adoption of climate-friendly behaviors. We further show that this gap is negatively associated with self-reported subjective well-being, suggesting that misalignment between beliefs and behaviors entails welfare costs.

Harnessing offshore wind energy offers a significant opportunity to contribute to the global transition to renewable energy. However, public acceptance remains essential to success. This study uses a discrete choice experiment to assess Australian preferences for offshore wind projects, focusing on trade-offs between visual impacts, local investment, environmental protections, and electricity bill changes. Mixed logit and latent class models reveal significant heterogeneity in preferences. Most respondents prefer projects located further from shore, with greater regional benefits, and stronger protections for marine mammals and birds. A cost-sensitive segment shows strong aversion to bill increases, while another group shows high willingness-to-pay and lower cost sensitivity, particularly among environmentally concerned, higher income individuals. We find asymmetries between willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept for bill changes, consistent with loss aversion. Respondents are more sensitive to bill increases than to equivalent savings. These findings provide valuable insights for offshore wind policy that address diverse community preferences while delivering maximum economic, environmental, and social benefits.

Using three waves of the German Heating and Housing Panel, we estimate variations in building heat demand across tenure types. Our results reveal that tenants in privately rented apartments face an average heat demand (kWh/ m$^2$) roughly 10\% higher than homeowners in otherwise comparable apartments. The divergence is larger in older buildings and urban areas. Our results underscore the importance of targeted policy instruments to align incentives and accelerate the energy transition in the housing stock of rented dwellings.

Building energy performance is a key metric in the context of decarbonising the built environment sector. Improving the energy efficiency and energy performance of homes will entail major investment decisions for governments, housing bodies and individuals. Investigating the relationship between house prices and Energy Performance Certificate ratings can inform the decision-making process for those energy efficiency investments, as well as the design and evaluation of home retrofit programmes and supports. Utilising a hedonic pricing methodology, this paper examines the influence energy efficiency attributes have on property list prices in Dublin, Ireland. The analysis is applied to a data set of over 11,000 properties in which property list prices from 2019-2022 are linked to factors pertaining to the quality and location of the property as well as the Irish BER system. The model assesses the monetary value of an uplift in BER, while controlling for factors relating to the home’s size, quality and location as well as the time of sale. Results indicate that a 10% improvement in BER performance is associated with a 0.6% increase in list price. While our results do not establish a causal relationship, these findings demonstrate a price premium of 2.6% for A and B rated homes as compared to D rated homes. In the context of an average 3-bed semi-detached home in Dublin, this translates to €12,200 of added capital value with potential relevance for individual investment decisions and policy support strategies

Reducing municipal waste remains a major policy challenge in France, in line with the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan. Unit-based pricing (UBP) is a key instrument to reduce waste generation and improve sorting, yet its public acceptability is debated. This paper analyzes households’ preferences for UBP schemes and the role of non-monetary behavioral incentives in shaping that acceptability. Using a discrete choice experiment on a representative sample of 3,000 French households, we vary UBP modalities and core characteristics of the waste management system. A randomized split-sample design compares a nudge, a boost, and a control group. Preferences are estimated with an error-component mixed logit model and a latent class analysis. The results reveal substantial heterogeneity: environmentally motivated households and those previously exposed to UBP are more likely to accept weight-based and drop-off schemes, particularly when nudged. While the nudge is effective in reducing the overall rejection of UBP in the sample, the boost shows a significant effect only among pro-environmental individuals, highlighting the importance of motivation for the effectiveness of this tool. Overall, these findings underscore the interaction of two key dimensions in increasing UBP acceptability: the compatibility of the waste management system with households’ recycling practices, particularly the type of UBP, and carefully designed behavioral interventions.

This study investigates the impact of green finance on sustainable economic growth in eight South Asian countries from 2002 to 2022. A Sustainable Economic Growth Index (SEGI) is developed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), incorporating economic structure, economic efficiency, and environmental quality indicators. The relationship between green finance and sustainable economic growth is analysed using a Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (Panel-ARDL) framework, with additional controls such as economic growth, carbon emissions, renewable energy consumption, urbanisation, trade openness, political stability, and institutional quality. The results show that green finance has a significant positive effect on sustainable economic growth in both the long and short run. Dumitrescu–Hurlin causality tests reveal a bidirectional causal relationship between green finance and sustainable economic growth. Robustness checks using DOLS and FMOLS confirm the stability of the findings. The study suggests that expanding green financial flows, strengthening institutions, and maintaining political stability can enhance sustainability outcomes in South Asia, while regulated trade openness may support technology transfer and broader long-term development.

Eco-friendly economic growth is not possible without environmentally supportive macroeconomic policies. This paper develops a theoretically dynamic environmental debt function to examine how fiscal and monetary instruments shape environmental debt across economies. Further, the same has been empirically analyzed using the lag fixed effect (LFE) model and validated with the Driscoll-Kraay standard error model. The results indicate that expansionary fiscal policy has an ex-post policy reaction effect on environmental debt, in which governments expand abatement in response to realized pollution levels rather than using it as an increasing input, as confirmed by the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. In contrast, contractionary monetary policy helps to reduce environmental debt. The study underscores that government abatement expenditure should be proactive (ex-ante) rather than reactive (ex-post), based on anticipated pollution levels rather than realized pollution levels.