Is Unemployment Good for the Environment?

Andrew Meyer

No 2015-02, Working Papers and Research from Marquette University, Center for Global and Economic Studies and Department of Economics

Abstract: Environmental quality is a public good, potentially impacted by everybody. Individual level pro-environmental behavior affects environmental quality in the aggregate. Therefore, it is important to understand what causes individual’s pro-environmental behaviors to change. We quantify the causal effect of one determinant, unemployment, using an EU-27 population representative Eurobarometer survey. Drawing on results from the theory of the private provision of public goods, and recognizing that unemployment decreases income and the opportunity cost of time, we formulate testable predictions that unemployment will decrease the extent of pro-environmental behaviors that require monetary contributions and increase the extent of pro-environmental behaviors that mainly require time/effort. Instrumental variables regressions provide empirical evidence to support these hypotheses. Changes in the unemployment rate within a sub-national region provide the exogenous variation needed to identify the causal effect. Several supplemental questions on the survey provide evidence that environmental issues lose saliency and economic issues gain saliency when one becomes unemployed, suggesting that interested parties may wish to emphasize cost savings of pro-environmental behavior rather than environmental benefits during times of increased unemployment.

Keywords: instrumental variables; pro-environmental behavior; Eurobarometer survey; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 J60 Q01 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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Journal Article: Is unemployment good for the environment? (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mrq:wpaper:2015-02

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