It is widely believed that an environmental tax (price regulation) and cap-and-trade (quantity regulation) are equally efficient in controlling pollution when there is no uncertainty. We show that this is not the case if some consumers (firms, local governments) are morally concerned about...

Besley and Persson (2023) pioneer a political economy model of a green transition with changing preferences. Here we solve for the optimal policy intervention and find that the optimal tax on the polluting good starts high and is subsequently declining, to support the transition in preferences....

We study road congestion as a mechanism design problem. In our basic model we analyze the allocation of a set of drivers among two roads, one of which may be congested. An additional driver on the congestible road imposes an externality on the other drivers by increasing their travel time. Each...

We study contact tracing in a new macro-epidemiological model in which infected agents may not show any symptoms of the disease and the availability of tests to detect asymptomatic spreaders is limited. Contact tracing is a testing strategy that aims to reconstruct the infection chain of newly...

I derive a social planner's optimal information design in an environment with quasi-hyperbolic discounting consumers without commitment. Consumption induces instantaneous utility, but unknown delayed cost. Consumers may or may not acquire additional costless information on the cost parameter....

Das Instrument des Emissionshandelssystems (EHS) wird von Umweltökonom:innen an prominenter Stelle zur Bewältigung der ökologischen Krisen sowohl im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs als auch in der Politikberatung empfohlen. Wir arbeiten drei implizite normative Prämissen des Lehrbuchmodells eines...

Dieser Beitrag liefert erste umfassende empirische Evidenz darüber, welchen Einfluss die Pandemie auf die Wahrnehmung von Klimawandel und Klimapolitik hat, inwieweit die Befragten gesundheitlich und finanziell betroffen sind sowie zur Einschätzung von klimapolitischen Aspekten bei...

This paper shows that the public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals have relative consumption concerns. By providing private goods, governments directly intervene in the consumption structure, and thereby have an instrument...

We elicit concern for animal welfare in an incentivized, direct and real setup that allows us to separate genuine interest in animal welfare from confounding factors like advertisement, replacement arguments or image concerns. Subjects choose between intensive farming and organic living...

In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understand the gift giver’s intention. Our...