Research
Working Papers
Carbon Pricing and Bounded Reasoning (JMP)
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
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
Quick, 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 failures to thoroughly consider substitutes and other adaptations to a permanent price shock can result, ex ante, in mistaken perceptions of inelasticity and policy ineffectiveness. I provide evidence of this in an incentivized survey experiment.
New draft coming soon.Â
In Progress
New Jobs and Green Transitions
We study the local impact on measurable environmental behaviors of large plant openings by firms involved in energy transition.
With Roberto Amaral Santos