Ravi Vora, University of Wyoming

Economic policies are too opaque and complicated to be easily assessed by voters and their representatives. The main focus of my research is to diagnose errors of voter evaluation, guided by the current frontier in behavioral economics, and design policies robust to bias. A special focus is policies tackling negative externalities.

Assistant Professor | CV | ravi.vora@uwyo.edu

Carbon Pricing and Bounded Reasoning

I show that weak support for economist-backed policy proposals is due in part to mistakes that voters make when reasoning about their consequences. I introduce a new policy that is isomorphic to a leading carbon tax-and-rebate proposal, but engineered to be robust to a key error that I identify in a lab setting. In a U.S. nationally representative survey, the new policy is more than 30 percentage points more popular. I show that this increase in support is concentrated among people who experienced difficulty fully assessing the original carbon tax policy.

Endogenous Green Preferences

Draft (pdf), Revised draft coming soon

With Guglielmo Zappala

Across 38 countries, we study the dynamics of environmental policies and individual preferences over twenty years. Exploiting within-country, across birth-cohort variation in exposure to environmental policy stringency, we document that cohorts exposed to more stringent policies in the past are more supportive of environmental policies thereafter.

Price, Demand and Hypothetical Thinking

Draft coming soon.

Inattentive decision-making systematically distorts perceptions of the effectiveness of pricing to reduce pollution externalities. When people are asked to make policy choices that affect a good's price, we traditionally assume that they accurately perceive quantities demanded conditional on price. But failure to consider substitutes and adaption to a price shock can result in mistaken ex ante perceptions of demand inelasticity and policy ineffectiveness, as I show in an incentivized experiment.

Green Jobs and Value Transitions

With Roberto Amaral Santos

We study the local impact on measurable environmental behaviors of large plant openings by firms involved in energy transition.

The New York congestion charge

Pre-analysis plan

With Stefano Carattini, Jonathan Hall, Axel Ockenfels and Klaus Schmidt

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