Friday 17th April 2015
Policy-makers are increasingly interested in behavioral instruments which may help better manage environmental issues. These instruments account for people’s behavioural limitations, such as cognitive mistakes, or build on people feelings (e.g. pride, shame) towards the environment. They provide a low cost alternative to traditional economic instruments like pigouvian taxes that often work imperfectly. But these new behavioral instruments also face a set of challenges, including the difficulty to evaluate welfare effects, and to conceive a robust environmental policy based on context-dependent effects. The talk will illustrate this critical discussion with two behavioral schemes that have been widely implemented worldwide: “green nudges” and “corporate environmental responsibility”.
Nicolas Treich is research director at INRA, and member of the Toulouse School of Economics in France. His research concerns risk and decision theory, environmental economics and benefit-cost analysis. He has over 30-peer reviewed publications in economic journals on various topics including (e.g.) the Precautionary Principle, risk and insurance demand, the value of statistical life and climate policy. He has organized several international conferences, and has written various broad audience papers and reports on risk policy issues. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review.
