{"title":"Natural disasters, salience and public support for climate change policy","authors":"Shawn J. McCoy, Ian K. McDonough, Constant Tra","doi":"10.1007/s00181-024-02601-3","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines whether or not public support for climate change mitigation policy can be affected by salient events such as natural disasters. We test this hypothesis using detailed, county-level data from the 2018 Yale Climate Opinion Maps, which documents both the degree to which residents of a county support climate change policy. We show that while natural disasters lead to statistically significant increases in both the share of a county’s population that support climate change mitigation policy and/or believe that climate change is happening, the magnitude of these estimated effects are economically small and perhaps not robust to hidden bias. As a result, and even assuming our results are in fact causal, the magnitude of our findings suggest that support as a policy objective by targeting agent’s beliefs about the risks climate change poses may ultimately be an ineffectual approach at achieving policymakers’ goals.</p>","PeriodicalId":11642,"journal":{"name":"Empirical Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Empirical Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-024-02601-3","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
This paper examines whether or not public support for climate change mitigation policy can be affected by salient events such as natural disasters. We test this hypothesis using detailed, county-level data from the 2018 Yale Climate Opinion Maps, which documents both the degree to which residents of a county support climate change policy. We show that while natural disasters lead to statistically significant increases in both the share of a county’s population that support climate change mitigation policy and/or believe that climate change is happening, the magnitude of these estimated effects are economically small and perhaps not robust to hidden bias. As a result, and even assuming our results are in fact causal, the magnitude of our findings suggest that support as a policy objective by targeting agent’s beliefs about the risks climate change poses may ultimately be an ineffectual approach at achieving policymakers’ goals.
期刊介绍：
Empirical Economics publishes high quality papers using econometric or statistical methods to fill the gap between economic theory and observed data. Papers explore such topics as estimation of established relationships between economic variables, testing of hypotheses derived from economic theory, treatment effect estimation, policy evaluation, simulation, forecasting, as well as econometric methods and measurement. Empirical Economics emphasizes the replicability of empirical results. Replication studies of important results in the literature - both positive and negative results - may be published as short papers in Empirical Economics. Authors of all accepted papers and replications are required to submit all data and codes prior to publication (for more details, see: Instructions for Authors).The journal follows a single blind review procedure. In order to ensure the high quality of the journal and an efficient editorial process, a substantial number of submissions that have very poor chances of receiving positive reviews are routinely rejected without sending the papers for review.Officially cited as: Empir Econ
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