The EU is considering implementing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. To inform the policy decision, we assess eight energy-intensive trade-exposed sectors in depth to distill what their characteristics imply for the shape of an ideal mechanism. The results highlight the difficulty of finding...

In response to the recent statement by the UN General Assembly President that only 11 years remain to avert global climate catastrophe, this paper investigates the effects of human population on climate and the ability to sustain ourselves, and finds that claims of crisis are overstated. UN data...

Environmental pollution has become a serious challenge in emerging markets. Using a unique survey of privately-owned enterprises in China, this paper investigates how polluting firms respond to institutional pressures. We find that polluting firms conform to external pressures by combining...

We study the impact of human capital and the level of education on the pollution-income relationship controlling for income inequality in 17 OECD countries. By applying an innovative approach to country grouping, based on the temporal evolution of income inequality and clustering techniques to...

The social costs of pollution and climate change hinge critically on humans’ ability to adapt. Based on transaction records from the world’s largest payment network, this research compiles daily travel flows and documents that China's rapid expansion of high-speed railways (HSR) facilitates...

High levels of carbon emissions and rising income inequality are interconnected challenges for the global society. Commonly-applied linear regression models fail to unravel the complexity of potential bi-directional transmission channels. Specifically, consumption, energy sources and the...

We conduct a framed field experiment in Mindoro, Philippines on ecological altruism. Behavioral differences between ethnic groups in Mindoro, the Tagalogs and the Mangyans, were investigated. We design a two-part donation task (i.e. dictator game) where the recipient of the donation is a local...

We study the effect of information provision on avoidance behavior, using China's staggered roll-out of air pollution information and a unique dataset of high-frequency mask purchase transactions. Employing a generalized difference-in-differences approach, we estimate that the provision of air...

We run a randomized controlled trial coupled with lab-in-the-field social network experiments in urban Dakar. Decision spillovers and health externalities play a large role in determining uptake of sanitation technology, with decision spillovers being largest among households that don’t...