0000000000890575
AUTHOR
Michael Ganslmeier
Are climate change policies politically costly?
Are policies designed to avert climate change (Climate Change Policies, or CCPs) politically costly? Using data on governmental popular support and the OECD's Environmental Stringency Index covering 30 countries between 2001 and 2015, our results show that CCPs are not necessarily politically costly: policy design matters. First, in contrast to non-market-based CCPs (such as emission limits), only market-based CCPs (such as emission taxes) entail political costs for the government. Second, the effects are only present when CCPs are adopted during periods of high oil prices, prior to elections, or in countries depending strongly on non-green (dirty) energy sources. Third, CCPs are only polit…
The impact of weather on COVID-19 pandemic.
AbstractRising temperature levels during spring and summer are often argued to enable lifting of strict containment measures even in the absence of herd immunity. Despite broad scholarly interest in the relationship between weather and coronavirus spread, previous studies come to very mixed results. To contribute to this puzzle, the paper examines the impact of weather on the COVID-19 pandemic using a unique granular dataset of over 1.2 million daily observations covering over 3700 counties in nine countries for all seasons of 2020. Our results show that temperature and wind speed have a robust negative effect on virus spread after controlling for a range of potential confounding factors. T…