Do Not Trash the Incentive! Monetary Incentives and Waste Sorting

Alessandro Bucciol, Natalia Montinari () and Marco Piovesan

No 11-093, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School

Abstract: This paper examines whether monetary incentives are an effective tool for increasing domestic waste sorting. We exploit the exogenous variation in the pricing systems experienced during the 1999-2008 decade by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy). We estimate with a panel analysis that pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) incentive-based schemes increase by 12.2% the ratio of sorted to total waste. This increase reflects a change in the behavior of households, who keep unaltered the production of total waste but sort it to a larger extent. In addition, we show that several factors that may discourage local administrators from adopting PAYT - illegal dumping and higher cost of management - are not important at the aggregate level. Hence, our results support the use of PAYT as an effective tool to increase waste sorting.

Keywords: Incentives; waste management; PAYT. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D78 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2011-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Do Not Trash the Incentive! Monetary Incentives and Waste Sorting (2015)
Working Paper: Do not Trash the Incentive! Monetary incentives and waste sorting (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hbs:wpaper:11-093

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