Séminaire de recherche // IESEG CLIMATE POLICIES UNDER INCOME INEQUALITY

CLIMATE POLICIES UNDER INCOME INEQUALITY BY MATHIEU LEFEBVRE BETA, Université de Strasbourg

In this paper, we propose an original experiment to assess the effect of income inequality on the efforts individuals are willing to make to face climate change.
Subjects must decide between mitigation or adaptation policies, i.e., they have to choose between decreasing the probability of a climate event for the group or protecting themselves from that damage. This choice can be assimilated to a social dilemma where mitigation is a public good and adaptation is a private good. Between treatments, we vary the distribution of income within groups so that we can modify the degree of inequality. We find that group contributions to mitigation are not affected by the degree of inequality. At the individual level, the results show that rich subjects invest more in absolute terms than poor ones but not in relative terms. Following Blanco et al. (2011), we also measure the aversion to disadvantageous and advantageous inequality of subjects. It turns out that the choice to mitigate or to adapt of rich subjects is solely explained by their social preferences and not by the fact that they are richer (i.e., that they have more ressources).