Who Pays to Save the Planet? A Sectoral Political Economy of Climate Change Mitigation
Alexander Gard-Murray
January 29, 2018
12:30–1:45 pm
Cabot 702
Light lunch will be served
What makes some countries pursue climate change mitigation more aggressively than others? To answer this question, we need to pay attention to the potential distributive impacts of mitigation policy. Though mitigation has long-term benefits globally, at the national level mitigation can impose near-term costs, which are often distributed unevenly across different social groups and economic sectors.
To capture this variation, I introduce a sectorally disaggregated model of comparative climate policymaking. Using econometric estimates of carbon regulation from 1995 to 2007, I show that a sectoral approach helps us understand how policymakers allocate the costs of mitigation across firms, investors, workers, and consumers, and how distributional issues constrain the prospects for stronger policy.
