Willingness to Pay to Avoid the Emotional Well-being Impact of Climate Change Information
Abstract: Against the backdrop of reports of increased climate anxiety, the emotional impact of paying attention to information may outweigh the instrumental value. Informed by a theoretical model of attention, this paper estimates the dollar value of the emotional well-being impacts of paying attention to climate change information. Specifically, it estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) to watch or avoid a climate change video instead of a neutral video in a way that isolates attention value from instrumental value. About 60-70 percent of undergraduate students do not value the shift in attention, whereas the remaining subjects are willing to pay a nonzero amount ($\$0.01 - \$0.10$ on average) to avoid the climate change video in most treatments. Higher reported positive emotions associated with a video are statistically significant predictors of WTP to watch that video instead of the other; interest in topic is the strongest predictor and it matters how emotions change relative to the start of the experiment. For the climate change media tested, depression symptoms and diagnosis are moderately consistent predictors of higher relative WTP to watch the climate change video, whereas anxiety symptoms are not. Accounting for the future and past-oriented aspects of the media tested, this is consistent with prior work in the affective science literature. This is the first paper to estimate the economic value of heterogenous emotional responses to climate change media, providing a step in the direction of improved consideration of emotional impacts of information by policymakers.
Works in Progress
Is Private Provision of Public Goods Motivated by Increasing Returns to Scale?
Abstract: Many public goods exhibit increasing returns to scale, which introduces strategic complementarity in private contribution. In experimental settings, researchers have tested the impact of increasing returns to scale and general strategic complementarity on public good contributions, finding positive relationships. Similar motivations for private provision of public goods with experimental evidence, such as social norm comparisons, have been incorporated into information interventions to test the potential for information to encourage more pro-social behavior. This paper assesses the behavioral impact of information about increasing returns to scale in a online crowd-funding setting with many contributors. The large number of potential contributors introduces an uncertain effect of information, as the increased incentive to free-ride may outweigh the increased incentive to contribute due to strategic complementarity, whereas free-riding is unlikely to dominate in the small group sizes of controlled experiments. I use variation in updates about stretch goals in funded Kickstarter projects and monthly data about contributions to empirically test whether increasing returns to scale can motivate increased private provision of public goods in large scale contexts.
Beyond Monoculture: Impacts and Enabling Conditions of Intercropping in the United States (with Zoe Sims and Renae Marshall)
Abstract: Intercropping increases crop diversity by intermingling strips, rows, or seeds of two or more different crops within a field. Meta-analyses of intercropping experiments have found that intercropping can increase yields by 23% relative to the two crops grown in monoculture (Li et al., 2023) and, at moderate fertilizer levels, can increase nitrogen uptake efficiency by 25% (Liu et al., 2024), implying lower input requirements and a reduction in fertilizer nitrogen pollution to the environment. Yet, in spite of the potential environmental benefits and crop production advantages of intercropping, monocultures dominate industrial farm systems. In this project, we examine the agronomic, economic, and policy channels and barriers to intercropping adoption in the United States, focusing on major commodity crops in the US Midwest. Based on two example types of intercropping system, we present an economic model that illustrates the social welfare impact of intercropping, incorporating the costs and benefits of intercropping for farm profits and for the environmental impacts of agriculture. We perform cost-benefit analysis according to the social welfare framework using i) case studies of interviewed intercropped farms and ii) standard agricultural budgeting parameters. We use these results to suggest potential levers of more widespread adoption of intercropping, and discuss implications for research, extension, and policy.