This paper examines the effectiveness of using community-level rewards to subsidize environmental protection. Specifically, we study the Connecticut Clean Energy Communities (CCEC) program that provides mostly symbolic rewards in the form of municipal photovoltaic installations in proportion to...

Can simple government programs effectively promote voluntary initiatives to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions? This paper provides an evaluation of how the Connecticut Clean Energy Communities program affects household decisions to voluntarily purchase "green" electricity, which is electricity...

This paper provides the first willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates in support of a national climate-change policy that are comparable with the costs of actual legislative efforts in the U.S. Congress. Based on a survey of 2,034 American adults, we find that households are, on average, willing to...

The United States and United Kingdom have longstanding traditions in use of environmental benefit-cost analysis (E-BCA). While there are similarities between how E-BCA is utilized, there are significant differences too, many of which mirror ongoing debates and recent developments in the...

This paper uses three different sources of data to investigate the association between the business cycle--measured with unemployment rates--and environmental concern. Building on recent research that finds internet search terms to be useful predictors of health epidemics and economic activity,...