Working papers

Fairness Views and Beliefs about the International Distribution of Climate Change Costs  (With Johanna Kober)    NEW!

International climate negotiations focus on three distinct climate change costs: mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage. This paper measures voters' fairness views about how these costs should be allocated between nations, and investigates whether fairness views and beliefs about a country's responsibility matter for policy support. In an online survey experiment, the paper finds that fairness views vary with the type of cost, that voters underestimate their country responsibility, and that fairness views and beliefs jointly predict voters' climate policy preferences. The paper also implements tailored treatments to test whether fairness views and beliefs causally affect policy support, but it finds no evidence of a causal link. The results highlight that, to be consistent with citizens' fairness ideals, the international distribution of mitigation costs should differ from the one of adaptation and loss and damage.  

From Consumers to Voters: Information Targeting in Climate Policy  (With Joël van der Weele)    NEW!

Information about climate change is a commonly used tool to help consumers and voters make decisions that better align with their climate concerns. Most research efforts have focused on consumers, often in the form of carbon labelling. We review recent evidence from large-sample field experiments on the impact of carbon labels on real-life consumption, and find that most effects are null or small. Moreover, carbon labels mostly work by making climate change salient, so effects are often transient. Instead, a younger literature strives to help voters understand systemic policies, building on the finding that voters often misperceive their impact and distributional effects. We review this growing literature, and we discuss the risk that information targeting consumers crowds out support for systemic policies. In light of the promising early findings, we propose that research on information-based strategies shift emphasis from consumers to voters, and focus on giving the latter a better understanding of the available options.

Memory Sophistication (With Taisuke Imai)

Human memory is less than perfect, leading to mistakes in judgments and decisions. This project experimentally investigates a) whether people are sophisticated about their memory limitations, and b) whether the complexity of the memory task affects sophistication. It finds that people can be both under and overconfident about their memory and the complexity of the memory task increases the size of the mistakes. Interference makes people overconfident, instead a high amount of information to remember makes them underconfident. Confidence goes up with time mitigating underconfidence but exacerbating overconfidence. These findings show that memory sophistication is a complicated phenomenon, they indicate when memory limitations generate expensive mistakes, and they suggest how to minimize the cost of memory mistakes in the workplace.

Available as Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis.

Work in progress

Memory driven mistakes when information is codified (With Taisuke Imai)

Since the beginning of history, humans have been codifying important information, storing it in safe and accessible ways. Recently, economists have started investigating imperfect human memory as a unifying cognitive cause of behavioral mistakes. In this paper, we develop an information acquisition model, whose assumptions are rooted in the psychological findings on human memory, to identify the contexts in which memory limitations are a promising explanation of human mistakes despite information being codified. Our results are consistent with documented empirical patterns and provide a map empiricists can use to decide whether to investigate the role of memory limitations in the settings they study.