Job Market Practice Talk: Risa Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

Speaker

Risa Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Risa is a PhD candidate in the Economics and Environmental Science (EES) Emphasis. She is interested in the intersection of behavioral economics and environmental economics, with her current work focusing on the welfare impacts of information about climate change and the environment. In particular, she uses information provision in order to understand novel motivations for voluntary climate action. Furthermore, in order to improve cost-benefit analysis of information provision policy, her research includes the monetary estimation of the emotional well-being impact of engaging with climate change media.

Prior to coming to the Bren School, Risa graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2020 with a Bachelor of Science in Applied and Resource Economics, where she worked with Project Drawdown to study the value of information about implementation of on-farm anaerobic digesters when provided by ombudsmen.

Title

Willingness to Pay to Avoid the Emotional Well-being Impact of Climate Change Information

Abstract

Against the backdrop of reports of increased climate anxiety, the emotional impact of paying attention to information may outweigh the instrumental value. Informed by a theoretical model of attention, this paper estimates the dollar value of the emotional well-being impacts of paying attention to climate change information. Specifically, it estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) to watch or avoid a climate change video instead of a neutral video in a way that isolates attention value from instrumental value. About 60-70 percent of undergraduate students are not willing to pay any amount to change the video they watch, whereas the remaining subjects are willing to pay a nonzero amount ($0.01 - $0.10 on average) to avoid the climate change video in most treatments. Higher reported positive emotions associated with a video are statistically significant predictors of WTP to watch that video instead of the other; interest in topic is the strongest predictor and it matters how emotions change relative to the start of the experiment. Depression symptoms and diagnosis are moderately consistent predictors of higher relative WTP to watch the climate change video, whereas anxiety symptoms are not. Accounting for the future and past-oriented aspects of the climate change media tested, this is consistent with prior work in the affective science literature. This is the first paper to estimate the economic value of heterogeneous emotional responses to climate change media, providing a step in the direction of improved consideration of emotional impacts of information by policymakers.