This paper studies whether pro-environmental consumption choices are consistent with utility maximization and what role the consumption behavior of reference persons and one's own past behavior play in this context. By combining data on individuals' pro-environmental consumption from a unique...

Most industrialized countries will experience a significant aging of their populations in the future. The consequences of this coming population aging for environmental preferences and environmental quality are ambiguous. This paper uses data on life satisfaction to investigate how preferences...

The sustainable supply of energy is high on the agenda of many European countries. One of the pertinent issues, the future role of nuclear power, has gained increasing attention after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan. As a contribution to preference elicitation, we test whether the...

This paper investigates the implications of the materials balance for optimal environmental policy. We find that neglecting the materials–emissions relationship – as is common in models of optimal environmental regulation – implies biases, whose sign depends on the regulatory instrument...

Recent armed domestic conflicts have been described as being related to natural resource abundance and as being characterized by new features not present in earlier internal conflicts (multiplicity of actors, devastation of production structures). The paper develops and tests a framework that...

Using happiness data to study economic issues is a burgeoning field in recent economic literature. This paper shows that happiness research has considerable potential for environmental economic analysis. The paper discusses some implications of happiness research for environmental policy...