Non-pecuniary incentives motivated by insights from psychology ("nudges") have been shown to be effective tools to change behavior in a variety of fields. An often unanswered question relevant for public policy is whether these promising interventions can be scaled up. In cooperation with a...

We investigate consumer inattention and imperfect information regarding the financial benefits of energy-efficient lighting using a randomized controlled trial with 1,084 observations. Results suggest that subjects generally know about cost savings of LED bulbs - the central lighting technology...

How much information should governments reveal to consumers if consumption choices have uninternalized consequences to society? How does an alternative tax policy compare to information disclosure? We develop a price theoretic model of information design that allows empiricists to identify the...

The aim of this study is to link variation in energy cost misperceptions to variation in households' energy consumption. The focus is on two sorts of misperceptions: First, present biased discounting of future energy costs and second, biased energy price beliefs. By running an artefactual field...

This study explores whether negative income shocks from the COVID-19 pandemic affect the demand for environmental policy. By running a survey in Germany in May 2020, we show that there is a large and negative correlation between the COVID-19 income shocks and the willingness to support green...

Social norms can help to foster cooperation and to overcome the free-rider problem in private provision of public goods. This paper focuses on the enforcement of social norms by a selfintroduced punishment and reward scheme. We analyse if subjects achieve to implement a normenforcement mechanism...

In the context of soaring demand for electricity, mitigating and controlling greenhouse gas emissions is a great challenge for China's power sector. Increasing attention has been placed on the evaluation of energy efficiency and CO2 abatement potential in the power sector. However, studies at...

The residential building sector is a major driver of current and future energy consumption and associated emissions, which can be potentially mitigated through significant energy-efficiency (EE) improvements in both emerging and developed countries. Yet, there are several persistent barriers...

One of the most promising ways of meeting climate policy targets is improving energy efficiency, i.e. reducing the amount of scarce and polluting resources needed to produce a given quantity of output. This study undertakes an empirical exercise using the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), a...

This paper reviews the literature on distributional effects of energy and carbon taxation with focus on microsimulation models. Most studies find that direct energy and carbon taxation tends to be regressive. Regressive effects occur mostly with respect to taxation of electricity or space...