Arbeitspapier
Climate action for (my) children
Sustaining large-scale public goods, such as the environment, requires individuals to take action; however, motivating voluntary climate action (VCA) is difficult because decision-makers today do not stand to benefit from their investments. Here, we propose that parents invest more in VCA if their link to future generations-through their offspring-is made salient. In a novel lab-in-the-field experiment, we vary whether parents are observed during a VCA decision (i.e., investing in planting real-world trees) by their own child. In addition to a no-observer control, we run additional control conditions with an unrelated adult or an unrelated child observing the parent decision-maker. As predicted, VCA varies across conditions, with larger treatment effects occurring when a parent's own child is the observer. In subgroup analyses, larger treatment effects occur among more educated parents. As a result of this study, VCA across conditions led to 14,000 trees being planted, offsetting approximately 8% of participants' annual CO2 emissions for around four generations.
- Language
-
Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
-
Series: Working Papers in Economics and Statistics ; No. 2020-23
- Classification
-
Wirtschaft
Design of Experiments: Other
Valuation of Environmental Effects
Climate; Natural Disasters and Their Management; Global Warming
Publicly Provided Goods: Other
Household Behavior and Family Economics: Other
- Subject
-
voluntary climate action
intergenerational cooperation
parents
children
observability
lab-in-the-field experiment
- Event
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Fornwagner, Helena
Hauser, Oliver P.
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
-
University of Innsbruck, Research Platform Empirical and Experimental Economics (eeecon)
- (where)
-
Innsbruck
- (when)
-
2020
- Handle
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Fornwagner, Helena
- Hauser, Oliver P.
- University of Innsbruck, Research Platform Empirical and Experimental Economics (eeecon)
Time of origin
- 2020
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