Many public goods can be provided at different spatial levels. Evidence from social identity theory and in-group favoritism raises the possibility that where higher-level provision is more efficient, subjects’ narrow concern for local outcomes (parochialism) could harm efficiency. Building on...

The literature on environmental R&D frequently studies innovation as a two-stage process, with a single R&D event leading from a conventional polluting technology to a perfectly clean backstop. We allow for uncertainty in innovation in that the new technology may turn out to generate a new...

We study the optimal R&D trajectory in a setting where new technologies are never perfect backstops in the sense that there is no perfectly clean technology that eventually solves the pollution problem once and for all. New technologies have stings attached, i.e. each emits a specific stock...

Recent experiments suggest that contribution decisions in a public goods game (PGG) are more likely to be cooperative if based on intuition rather than reflection. This paper (i) reinvestigates the behavioral impact of so-called cognitive style in the PGG; and (ii) connects it with an earlier...

In the wake of several high-profile natural disasters, crowding effects between public relief and private investments in disaster preparedness have recently attracted renewed attention. We examine how non-hypothetical self-insurance behavior by households responds to variations in public...

In a climate system that is indifferent about where mitigation is carried out, the logic of comparative advantages favors abatement locations in developing and rapidly industrializing countries. There is evidence, however, that citizens of industrialized countries who voluntarily fund climate...

We conduct a large-scale field experiment with 2,440 subjects in which we exogenously vary the price of contributing to the closest empirical counterpart of an infinitely large public good, climate change mitigation. We find that the price effect is robust and negative, but quantitatively weak,...

In the climate policy debate, a rhetoric has evolved that attributes a high potential to "voluntary climate action". We turn to the population of Germany, the fourth largest cumulative GHG emitter, to obtain an Internet-)representative estimate of the individual willingness to abate one ton of...

This paper studies monitoring and punishment behavior by second and third parties in a cooperation experiment with endogenous information structures: Players are uninformed whether the target player cooperated or defected at the cooperation stage, but can decide to resolve the information...

Solar radiation management (SRM) technologies are considered one of the likeliest forms of geoengineering. If developed, a future generation could deploy them to limit the damages caused by the atmospheric carbon stock inherited from the current generation, despite their negative side effects....