Motivate the Crowd or Crowd-them out? The Impact of Local Government spending on the Voluntary Provision of a Green Public Good

Cities are increasingly hold accountable for climate action. By demonstrating their pro-environmentality through own climate-related activities, they not at least aspire to encourage individual climate protection efforts. Based on standard economic theory there is little reason to assume that this i...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:MAGKS - Joint Discussion Paper Series in Economics (Band 33-2022)
Autores principales: Bartels, Lara, Kesternich, Martin
Formato: Artículo
Lenguaje:inglés
Publicado: Philipps-Universität Marburg 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Texto Completo PDF
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Cities are increasingly hold accountable for climate action. By demonstrating their pro-environmentality through own climate-related activities, they not at least aspire to encourage individual climate protection efforts. Based on standard economic theory there is little reason to assume that this is a promising strategy. Financed by taxpayers’ money, cities’ contributions are considered as substitutes that crowd-out private contributions to the same public good. Inspired by research on providing information on reference group behavior, we challenge this argument and conduct a framed-field experiment to analyze the impact of reference group information on the voluntary provision of a green public good. We investigate whether information on previous contributions by fellow citizens or the city affect individual contributions. We do not find statistical evidence that city-level information crowds-out additional individual contributions. A reference to fellow citizens significantly increases the share of contributors as it attracts subjects that are not per-se pro-environmentally oriented.
Descripción Física:35 Seiten
ISSN:1867-3678
DOI:10.17192/es2024.0740