Can We Reconcile French People with the Carbon Tax? Disentangling Beliefs from Preferences

Thomas Douenne () and Adrien Fabre

No 2019.05, Policy Papers from FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

Abstract: Using a new survey and National households' survey data, we investigate French perception over carbon taxation. We find that French people largely reject a tax and dividend policy where revenues of the tax would be redistributed uniformly. However, their perception about the properties of the tax are biased: people overestimate the negative impact on their purchasing power, wrongly think the scheme is regressive, and do not perceive it as environmentally effective. Our econometric analysis shows that correcting these three bias would suffice to generate majority acceptance. Yet, we find that people's beliefs are persistent and their revisions biased towards pessimism, so that only few can be convinced.

Keywords: Climate Policy; Carbon tax; Bias; Beliefs Preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D91 H23 H31 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-pbe and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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http://faere.fr/pub/PolicyPapers/Douenne_Fabre_FAERE_PP2019.05.pdf First version, 2019 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Can We Reconcile French People with the Carbon Tax? Disentangling Beliefs from Preferences (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fae:ppaper:2019.05

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