Ramsey with Environmental Awareness

This paper speculates how Ramsey’s (1928) model of optimal consumption and saving would have been constructed had Sir Frank Ramsey lived in a period of greater awareness of the environmental damaged caused by production processes. The paper extends Ramsey’s model to the case where the instantaneous satisfaction of the representative agent from consumption is spoiled by the degradation of his physical environment and spending on cleaning up and greening operations are therefore engendered.Consumption, environmental investment, golden rule

A Paradox of Environmental Awareness Campaigns

We build a workable game of common-property resource extraction under rational Bayesian learning about the renewal prospects of a resource. We uncover the impact of exogenously shifting the prior beliefs of each player on the response functions of others. What we find about the role of environmental conservation campaigns is paradoxical. To the extent that such campaigns instill overly high pessimism about the potential of natural resources to reproduce, they create anti-conservation incentives: anyone having exploitation rights becomes inclined to consume more of the resource earlier, before others overexploit, and before the resource's stock is reduced to lower levels.renewable resources; resource exploitation; non-cooperative dynamic games; Bayesian learning; stochastic games; commons; rational learning; uncertainty; beliefs

Tone from the Top in Risk Management: A Complementarity Perspective on How Control Systems Influence Risk Awareness

Prompted by the weaknesses of standardized risk management approaches in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, scholars, regulators, and practitioners alike emphasize the importance of creating a risk-aware culture in organizations. Recent insights highlight the special role of tone from the top as crucial driver of risk awareness. In this study, we take a systems-perspective on control system design to investigate the role of tone from the top in creating risk awareness. In particular, we argue that both interactive and diagnostic use of budgets and performance measures interact with tone from the top in managing risk awareness. Our results show that interactive control strengthens the effect of tone from the top on risk awareness, while tone from the top and diagnostic control are, on average, not interrelated with regard to creating risk awareness. To shed light on the boundary conditions of the proposed interdependencies, we further investigate whether the predicted interdependencies are sensitive to the level of perceived environmental uncertainty. We find that the effect of tone from the top and interactive control becomes significantly stronger in a situation of high perceived environmental uncertainty. Most interestingly, tone from the top and diagnostic control are complements with regard to risk awareness in settings of low perceived environmental uncertainty and substitutes at high levels of perceived environmental uncertainty.Series: Department of Strategy and Innovation Working Paper Serie

The Determinants of Environmental Awareness and Behavior

This paper investigates the determinants of environmental values across countries. Its purpose is to put the role of economic affluence into perspective by challenging the conventional wisdom that states that the level of economic affluence influences the level of environmental concern expressed by the population. While this paper does not question the fact that large scale environmental defensive activities are likely to be influenced by the level of income in a country, it is hypothesized that environmental awareness and individual involvement in environmental protection need not be a function of the level of economic affluence. To test this hypothesis, three variables are created-Positive Environmental Attitudes, Willingness to Pay to Protect the Environment, and Human-Environment Relationship-using data from the World Values Survey (1995-1997). The variables are regressed against a set of economic, demographic, political, psychological and education variables. The results show that economic affluence has, at best, a marginal direct influence on environmental awareness and no direct impact on environmental behavior. The paper demonstrates that the degree of urbanization, the level of subjective well-being and the level of income equality have direct effects on awareness, while education, population pressure and happiness are significantly correlated with environmental behavior.

We Mean Green Environmental Science Club

Lesson Plans for an Environmental Science Club. This club seeks to promote environmental awareness to elementary students through hands-on activities, videos, and discussion

Implicit Environmental Attitudes: Critique and Technique to Promote Awareness

open access articleAttitudes toward the environment are understood in psychological science as the result of separate mental systems, one conscious and the other unconscious, and capable of affecting behavior outside of awareness. For example, the common incongruity between what people say about global sustainability and what they do about the environment has been explicated by the influence of implicit environmental attitudes. This study examined the operational adequacy of the commonly used Implicit Association Test (IAT) by directly asking participants to report their recognition of behavioral influences whilst performing an IAT. An analytic technique of awareness assessment was introduced to improve on traditional post-experimental questioning, by requiring a constrained report that provided introspective access to task-related knowledge in awareness. Results revealed participants were very aware of their IAT response latencies, they accurately recognized IAT features that produced those latencies, and the validity of this awareness predicted their test scores, challenging the claim to attitude effects of which individuals are unaware. Thus, the critical evaluation showed the IAT method to be inadequate as a measure of environmental attitudes that are implicit. Applications of the awareness assessment technique are discussed for evaluating tests of implicit cognition, and for promoting individual mindfulness of one’s own environmental attitude

Environmental Awareness and Happiness

The focus of this paper is on the relationship between an individual's environmental attitudes (or awareness) and well-being. We use an ordered probit model to examine the relationship between individual measures of subjective well-being and environmental attitudes regarding ozone pollution and species extinction. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey we find a negative correlation between well-being and concern about ozone pollution and a positive correlation between well-being and concern about species extinction. These relationships hold when explanatory variables are included indicating whether or not the person lives in a polluted environment and whether or not the person engages in outdoor leisure activities. These relationships also hold when we control for individual psychological traits. Our results are an important step in clarifying some of the subtleties of the relationship between environmental quality and well-being. This research area is important in addressing the related issues of sustainability and environmental policy design.