Moral bandwidth and environmental concerns during a public health crisis: Evidence from Germany

Abstract

Did the COVID-19 pandemic crowd out environmental concerns, as one might expect if “pools of worry” were finite or “moral bandwidth” was limited? We use Chancellor Angela Merkel’s address to the German nation on 18 March 2020 as the threshold in a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) to evaluate the effects of an increase in COVID-based economic and health concerns on the climate and environmental concerns of respondents to the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We find no evidence of crowding out – there is even some indication that environmental concerns increased, especially on the intensive margin – and show that this result survives various robustness checks. We also share some evidence that the treatment effects are heterogeneous: the concerns of older and more patient Germans, as well as those who report more social trust, increased relative to other groups. This is consistent with the absence of bandwidth constraints, but other interpretations – hierarchical or complementary concerns, for example – are also possible.