In many developing countries, environmental quality remains low and policies to improve it have been inconsistently effective. This paper conducts a case study of environmental policy in India, focusing on unprecedented Supreme Court rulings that targeted industrial pollution in the Ganga River....

Empirically evaluating environmental policies requires grappling with impacts that exhibit not only cross-sectional heterogeneity, but also variation across time. Phased policy roll-outs offer opportunities for improvement across cohorts and policy effects can grow or decay, especially when...

Economists recommend Pigouvian taxes as the most efficient way to fight climate change. Yet, carbon taxes are difficult to implement politically. To understand why, we study Washington State's two failed carbon tax referendums from 2016 and 2018—the first such votes in the United States. We...

Surveys show majority U.S. support for a carbon tax. Yet none has been adopted. Why? We study two failed carbon tax initiatives in Washington State in 2016 and 2018. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that Washington's real-world campaigns reduced support by 20 percentage...