Risa Lewis

Biography

Risa Lewis is a Ph.D. candidate in environmental economics studying the welfare impacts of information about the environment, with a focus on information that targets voluntary environmental action. Her research combines economic theory, controlled experiments, and individual-level consumer data to investigate: (1) What kinds of environmental information are welfare-improving, and in what contexts? (2) What are the drivers of heterogeneous emotional responses to information? (3) How do pro-social motivation, behavior, and mental well-being respond to information about voluntary environmental action and environmental goods?

Her work ranges from estimating the economic value of the emotional well-being impact of exposure to media about climate change to the behavior change impacts of information interventions targeting largely unexplored motivations for pro-social behavior. Her job market paper is the first to show that people are willing to pay a non-zero amount to avoid re-exposure to information about climate change, using an in-person controlled experiment.

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.

Job Market Paper 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 do not value the shift in attention, 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. For the climate change media tested, 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 media tested, this is consistent with prior work in the affective science literature. This is the first paper to estimate the economic value of heterogenous emotional responses to climate change media, providing a step in the direction of improved consideration of emotional impacts of information by policymakers.

JEL Codes:  D83, L82, C91, D91, Q54, I10