Fairness and the support of redistributive environmental policies
Loading...
Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Exemptions from costly policy measures are frequently applied to alleviate financial
burdens to specific market participants. Using a stated-choice experiment
with around 6,000 German household heads, we test how exemptions for lowincome
households and energy-intensive companies influence the political acceptability
of additional cost for the promotion of renewable energies. We find that the
support for the policy is substantially higher when low-income households are
exempt rather than the industry. Introducing exemptions for low-income households
on top of existing exemptions for the industry increases the acceptability
of the policy. We show that the support for exemptions as one example of distributional
policy design is associated with individual behavioral measures like
inequality aversion and fairness perceptions.
Description
Table of contents
Keywords
fairness, discrete choice experiment, behavioral economics, political acceptance, exemptions renewable energy, environmental policy, distributional effects