The European Union Emissions Trading System might yield large co-benefits from pollution reduction.

Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and reducing air pollution represent two pressing and interwoven environmental challenges. While international carbon markets, such as the European Union emissions trading system (EU ETS), have demonstrated their effectiveness in curbing carbon emissions (CO[Formula: see text]), their indirect impact on hazardous co-pollutants remains understudied. This study investigates how key toxic air pollutants-sulfur dioxide (SO[Formula: see text]), fine particulate matter (PM[Formula: see text]), and nitrogen oxides (NO[Formula: see text])-evolved after the introduction of the EU ETS with a comparative analysis of regulated and unregulated sectors. Leveraging the generalized synthetic control method, we offer an ex post analysis of how the EU ETS and concurrent emission standards may have jointly generated sizable pollution reductions in regulated sectors between 2005 and 2021. We provide an aggregate assessment that these pollution reductions could translate into large health co-benefits, potentially in the hundreds of billions of Euros, even when bounding the effect of emission standards. These order-of-magnitude estimates underscore key implications for policy appraisal and motivate further microlevel research around the health co-benefits of carbon abatement.

Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis.

Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others ('instrumental harm') reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equally ('impartial beneficence') may increase trust. In a multi-site experiment spanning 22 countries on six continents, participants (N = 23,929) completed self-report (N = 17,591) and behavioural (N = 12,638) measures of trust in leaders who endorsed utilitarian or non-utilitarian principles in dilemmas concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Across both the self-report and behavioural measures, endorsement of instrumental harm decreased trust, while endorsement of impartial beneficence increased trust. These results show how support for different ethical principles can impact trust in leaders, and inform effective public communication during times of global crisis. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION STATEMENT: The Stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 13 November 2020. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13247315.v1 .

The social cost of contacts: Theory and evidence for the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.

Building on the epidemiological SIR model, we present an economic model with heterogeneous individuals deriving utility from social contacts creating infection risks. Focusing on social distancing of individuals susceptible to an infection we theoretically characterize the gap between private and social cost of contacts. Our main contribution is to quantify this gap by calibrating the model with unique survey data from Germany on social distancing and impure altruism from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The optimal policy is to drastically reduce contacts at the beginning to almost eradicate the epidemic and keep them at levels that contain the pandemic at a low prevalence level. We find that also in laissez faire, private protection efforts by forward-looking, risk averse individuals would have stabilized the epidemic, but at a much higher prevalence of infection than optimal. Altruistic motives increase individual protection efforts, but a substantial gap to the social optimum remains.

Moral Suasion and the Private Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

We study how moral suasion that appeals to two major ethical theories, Consequentialism and Deontology, affects individual intentions to contribute to a public good. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as an exemplary case where there is a large gap between private and social costs and where moral suasion has been widely used as a policy instrument. Based on a survey experiment with a representative sample of around 3500 Germans at the beginning of the pandemic, we study how moral appeals affect contributions with low and high opportunity costs, hand washing and social distancing, to reduce the infection externality as well as the support for governmental regulation. We find that Deontological moral suasion, appealing to individual moral duty, is effective in increasing planned social distancing and hand-washing, while a Consequentialist appeal only increases planned hand-washing. Both appeals increase support for governmental regulation. Exploring heterogeneous treatment effects reveals that younger respondents are more susceptible to Deontological appeals. Our results highlight the potential of moral appeals to induce intended private contributions to a public good or the reduction of externalities, which can help to overcome collective action problems for a range of environmental issues.