Human Nature
Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by Contradicting Just World Beliefs
Matthew Feinberg & Robb Willer
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Though scientific evidence for the existence of global warming continues to mount, in the U.S. and other countries belief in global warming has stagnated or even decreased in recent years. One possible explanation for this pattern is that information about the potentially dire consequences of global warming threatens deeply held beliefs that the world is just, orderly, and stable. Individuals overcome this threat by denying or discounting the existence of global warming, ultimately resulting in decreased willingness to counteract climate change. Two experiments provide support for this explanation of the dynamics of belief in global warming, suggesting that less dire messaging could be more effective for promoting public understanding of climate change research.
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Using Loopholes to Reveal the Marginal Cost of Regulation: The Case of Fuel-Economy Standards
Soren Anderson & James Sallee
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Estimating the cost of regulation is difficult. Firms sometimes reveal costs indirectly, however, when they exploit loopholes to avoid regulation. We apply this insight to fuel economy standards for automobiles. These standards feature a loophole that gives automakers a bonus when they equip a vehicle with flexible-fuel capacity. Profit-maximizing automakers will equate the marginal cost of compliance using the loophole, which is observable, with the unobservable costs of strategies that genuinely improve fuel economy. Based on this insight, we estimate that tightening standards by one mile per gallon would have cost automakers just $9-$27 per vehicle in recent years.
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The Market Instinct: The Demise of Social Preferences for Self-Interest
Andrew Reeson & John Tisdell
Environmental and Resource Economics, November 2010, Pages 439-453
Abstract:
Environmental policy design has much to gain from a better understanding of existing voluntary behaviour and motivations. In laboratory experiments, participants often exhibit social preferences such as altruism, spite, reciprocity and notions of fairness. In contrast, traditional neoclassical theory assumes that people act rationally in a way that maximises their self-interest. In environmental markets, social preferences and self-interest interact. We apply experimental economics to test the hypothesis that social preferences are not maintained in the presence of a competitive market institution. In the initial public goods game, many participants were prepared to make costly voluntary contributions. However the introduction of the market institution triggered a 'market instinct' in experimental participants. They abandoned the social preferences they were previously expressing and became self-interested profit maximisers. This self-interested behaviour persisted even after the market institution was discontinued. These findings are important to understanding the role and impact of markets for environmental policy.
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Darwin's error? Patrick Matthew and the catastrophic nature of the geologic record
Michael Rampino
Historical Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 1831, the Scottish horticulturalist Patrick Matthew (1790-1874) published a clear statement of the law of natural selection in an Appendix to his book Naval Timber and Arboriculture, which both Darwin and Wallace later acknowledged. Matthew, however, was a catastrophist, and he presented natural selection within the contemporary view that relatively long intervals of environmental stability were episodically punctuated by catastrophic mass extinctions of life. Modern studies support a similar picture of the division of geologic time into long periods of relative evolutionary stability ended by sudden extinction events. Mass extinctions are followed by recovery intervals during which surviving taxa radiate into vacated niches. This modern punctuated view of evolution and speciation is much more in line with Matthew's episodic catastrophism than the classical Lyellian-Darwinian gradualist view.
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Climate Shocks and Sino-nomadic Conflict
Ying Bai & James Kai-sing Kung
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Employing droughts and floods to proxy for changes in precipitation, this paper shows nomadic incursions into settled Han Chinese regions over a period of more than two thousand years - the most enduring clash of civilizations in history - to be positively correlated with less rainfall and negatively correlated with more rainfall. Consistent with findings that economic shocks are positively correlated with conflicts in modern Sub-Saharan Africa when instrumented by rainfall, our reduced-form results extend this relationship to a very different temporal and geographical context-the Asian continent-and long historical period.
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Clearing the Air? The Effects of Gasoline Content Regulation on Air Quality
Maximilian Auffhammer & Ryan Kellogg
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines whether U.S. gasoline content regulations, which impose substantial costs on consumers, have successfully reduced ozone pollution. We take advantage of spatial and temporal variation in the regulations' implementation to show that federal gasoline standards, which allow refiners flexibility in choosing a compliance mechanism, did not improve air quality. This outcome occurred because minimizing the cost of compliance does not reduce emissions of those compounds most prone to forming ozone. In California, however, we find that precisely targeted, inflexible regulations requiring the removal of particularly harmful compounds significantly improved air quality.
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Stagnation and Innovation Before Agriculture
Gregory Dow & Clyde Reed
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
During the roughly 190,000 years between the emergence of anatomically modern humans and the transition to agriculture, sustained economic progress was rare. Although there were important innovations in the Upper Paleolithic, evidence from paleodemography indicates that population densities were driven more by climatic conditions than by technological innovations in food acquisition. We develop a model in which technological knowledge is subject to mutation and selection across generations. In a static environment, long run stagnation is the norm. However, climate shocks can induce experimentation with latent resources. This generates punctuated equilibria with greater technical capabilities and higher population densities at successive plateaus. The model is consistent with archaeological data on climate, population, diet, and technology from the Upper Paleolithic through the early Neolithic.
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From constraint to sufficiency: The decoupling of energy and carbon from human needs, 1975-2005
Julia Steinberger & Timmons Roberts
Ecological Economics, 15 December 2010, Pages 425-433
Abstract:
We investigate the relationship between human needs, energy consumption and carbon emissions for several indicators of human development: life expectancy, literacy, income and the Human Development Index. We find that high human development can be achieved at moderate energy and carbon levels; increasing energy and carbon past this level does not necessarily contribute to higher living standards. By conducting a novel longitudinal analysis from 1975 to 2005, we observe a previously undetected decoupling of the per capita energy and carbon required for human needs. If resources were equally distributed, current energy and carbon levels would be more than sufficient to satisfy global human needs at high levels of human development. By projecting current trends to 2030, we demonstrate that the global energy consumption and carbon emissions required to satisfy human needs will decrease with time, despite growth in population.
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Lead, Mortality, and Productivity
Karen Clay, Werner Troesken & Michael Haines
NBER Working Paper, October 2010
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of water-borne lead exposure on infant mortality in American cities over the period 1900-1920. Infants are highly sensitive to lead, and more broadly are a marker for current environmental conditions. The effects of lead on infant mortality are identified by variation across cities in water acidity and the types of service pipes - lead, iron, or concrete - which together determined the extent of lead exposure. Time series estimates and estimates that restrict the sample to cities with lead pipes provide further support for the causal link between water-borne lead and infant mortality. The magnitudes of the effects were large. In 1900, a decline in exposure equivalent to an increase in pH from 6.7 to 7.5 in cities with lead-only pipes would have been associated with a decrease in infant mortality of 12.3 to 14.3 percent or about 22 fewer infant deaths per 1,000 live births. City-level evidence on wages in manufacturing suggests that the adverse health effects of lead may have extended beyond infants.
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The Economic Growth Impact of Hurricanes: Evidence from US Coastal Counties
Eric Strobl
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimate the impact of hurricane strikes on local economic growth rates. To this end we assemble a panel data set of US coastal counties' growth rates and construct a novel hurricane destruction index that is based on a monetary loss equation, local wind speed estimates derived from a physical wind field model, and local exposure characteristics. Our econometric results suggest that a county's annual economic growth rate falls on average by 0.45 percentage points, 28 per cent of which is due to richer individuals moving away from affected counties. We also find that the impact of hurricanes is netted out in annual terms at the state level and does not affect national economic growth rates at all.
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Climate and Civil War: Is the Relationship Robust?
Marshall Burke, John Dykema, David Lobell, Edward Miguel & Shanker Satyanath
NBER Working Paper, October 2010
Abstract:
A recent paper by Burke et al. (henceforth "we") finds a strong historical relationship between warmer-than-average temperatures and the incidence of civil war in Africa (Burke et al. 2009). These findings have recently been challenged by Buhaug (2010) who finds fault with how we controlled for other potential explanatory variables, how we coded civil wars, and with our choice of historical time period and climate dataset. We demonstrate that Buhaug's proposed method of controlling for confounding variables has serious econometric shortcomings and show that our original findings are robust to the use of different climate data and to alternate codings of major war. Using Buhaug's preferred climate data under sound econometric assumptions yields results that suggest an even stronger relationship between temperature and conflict for the 1981-2002 period than we originally reported. We do find that our historical relationship between temperature and conflict weakens over the last decade, a period of unprecedented African economic growth and very few large wars.
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Making Self-Regulation More Than Merely Symbolic: The Critical Role of the Legal Environment
Jodi Short & Michael Toffel
Administrative Science Quarterly, September 2010, Pages 361-369
Abstract:
Using data from a sample of U.S. industrial facilities subject to the federal Clean Air Act from 1993 to 2003, this article theorizes and tests the conditions under which organizations' symbolic commitments to self-regulate are particularly likely to result in improved compliance practices and outcomes. We argue that the legal environment, particularly as it is constructed by the enforcement activities of regulators, significantly influences the likelihood that organizations will effectively implement the self-regulatory commitments they symbolically adopt. We investigate how different enforcement tools can foster or undermine organizations' normative motivations to self-regulate. We find that organizations are more likely to follow through on their commitments to self-regulate when they (and their competitors) are subject to heavy regulatory surveillance and when they adopt self-regulation in the absence of an explicit threat of sanctions. We also find that historically poor compliers are significantly less likely to follow through on their commitments to self-regulate, suggesting a substantial limitation on the use of self-regulation as a strategy for reforming struggling organizations. Taken together, these findings suggest that self-regulation can be a useful tool for leveraging the normative motivations of regulated organizations but that it cannot replace traditional deterrence-based enforcement.
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Should the US Congress appropriate funds for the repurchase of older vehicles?
David Bernstein
Applied Economics Letters, October 2010, Pages 1475-1478
Abstract:
Proponents of vehicle buyback programmes maintain that the earlier retirement of older vehicles will reduce pollution, increase income for lower income households and stimulate the automobile industry. This article provides a brief assessment of costs and benefits of vehicle buyback programmes. There are environmental benefits from the early retirement of automobiles and light trucks; however, some pollutants are not closely related to vehicle age. Moreover, vehicle buyback programmes are unlikely to reduce consumption of gasoline by a substantial amount and may even increase gasoline consumption in the short run because vehicle age is associated with an increase in miles travelled. Vehicle buyback programmes are not unambiguously progressive because they will increase the price of older vehicles, the only source of transportation for lower income groups. This analysis does not justify the creation of a national large-scale vehicle buyback programme. However, vehicle buyback programme targeting the highest emission vehicles and vehicles likely to fail emission inspections creates support for more stringent vehicle emission standards and systems, a proven method to reduce mobile source air pollution. It may be useful to expand subsidies for existing local vehicle buyback programmes and create incentives for the creation of these programmes by additional municipalities.
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The effect of warfare on the environment
Rafael Reuveny, Andreea S Mihalache-O'Keef & Quan Li
Journal of Peace Research, November 2010, Pages 749-761
Abstract:
Does warfare affect the environment? This question has received some theoretical and empirical attention, but none of the extant studies has employed large-N statistical models. This article theorizes the possible effects of warfare on the environment and estimates large-N statistical models of these effects on CO2 emissions per capita, NOX emissions per capita, the rate of change in forested area, and a composite indicator of environmental stress reduction. The results indicate that warfare significantly affects the environment, but the signs and sizes of these effects depend on the environmental attribute (whether the fighting is at home or abroad) and development (whether the fighting country is developed or less developed). Warfare reduces CO2 emissions, but the effect is weaker in less developed countries (LDCs) than in developed countries (DCs). Warfare increases deforestation when fought at home and promotes forest growth when fought abroad, particularly in the LDCs. Warfare at home reduces NOX emissions for the LDCs and increases them for the DCs; warfare abroad increases NOX emissions for both the DCs and LDCs. Finally, warfare increases aggregated environmental stress, particularly for the LDCs when fought at home and for the DCs when fought abroad. The sizes of these effects are on par with or larger than the mandated or recommended policy goals stated by the US government for changes in CO 2 and NOX emissions, and by the World Bank (and by implication the DCs driving its policy) for the rate of deforestation, during the coming decade.
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Does more federal environmental funding increase or decrease states' efforts?
Benjamin Clark & Andrew Whitford
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the flow of federal grants-in-aid from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the states. We simultaneously model two dependent variables (the flow of EPA funds, and state environmental and natural resource budgets) to identify the independent roles of state political institutions, political preferences, economic and demographic characteristics, and the task environment. Our central focus, though, is on the relationship between grants and state spending after taking into account those direct effects. We examine the evidence for positive association (a flypaper effect) and negative association (crowding out). We show the different roles for political institutions, political preferences, demographic and economic characteristics, and the task environment in each spending context. Most importantly, we find evidence for a flypaper effect between federal funds and state spending: Federal spending and state spending are positively correlated after accounting for the contribution of the unique factors.
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Robert Deacon, Dominic Parker & Christopher Costello
NBER Working Paper, September 2010
Abstract:
We analyze a seldom used, but highly promising form of rights-based management over common pool resources that involves the self-selection of heterogeneous fishermen into sectors. The fishery management regime assigns one portion of an overall catch quota to a voluntary cooperative, with the remainder exploited as a commons by those choosing to fish independently. Data from an Alaska commercial salmon fishery confirm our model's key predictions, that the co-op would facilitate the consolidation of fishing effort, coordination of harvest activities, sharing of information and provision of shared infrastructure. We estimate that the resulting rent gains were at least 25%. A lawsuit filed by two disgruntled independents led to the co-op's demise, an outcome also predicted by our model. Our analysis provides guidance for designing fishery reform that leads to Pareto improvements for fishermen of all skill levels, which suggests a structure that enables reform without losers.