Carbon pricing, carbon dividends and cooperation: Experimental evidence

Arbeitspapier

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the most pressing global issues today and finding means of mitigation is of utmost importance. To this end, we investigate whether carbon taxes on their own and coupled with revenue recycling schemes (symmetric or asymmetric carbon dividends) improve cooperative behavior in a modified threshold public goods game of loss avoidance. We implement a randomized controlled trial on a large sample of the U.S. population and measure the portion of groups who successfully remain below a critical consumption threshold. We find that a carbon tax with symmetric dividends reduces harmful consumption levels, but coupling the tax with asymmetric dividends not only enhances consumption reduction but also significantly improves group cooperation in avoiding simulated climate change. Our results show that the application of a carbon tax and asymmetric carbon dividends reduces the failure rate to about one-fourth (6%), compared to the 22% observed in a baseline condition. We find that environmental attitudes, conservatism, education, and gender are significantly associated with success rates in staying below the threshold.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: Working Papers in Economics and Statistics ; No. 2023-07

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Group Behavior ; Taxation and Subsidies: Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies ; Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents: General ; Public Goods ; Climate; Natural Disasters and Their Management; Global Warming
• Thema: climate change ; carbon pricing ; carbon tax ; carbon dividend ; revenue recycling ; cooperation

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Bachler, Sebastian ; Flecke, Sarah Lynn ; Huber, Jürgen ; Kirchler, Michael ; Schwaiger, Rene
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): University of Innsbruck, Research Platform Empirical and Experimental Economics (eeecon)
• (wo): Innsbruck
• (wann): 2023

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/278530
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:41 MEZ