As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Pamela Campa.

She will present her work titled Facing the Hard Truth: Evidence from Climate Change Ignorance, joint with Ferenc Szucs.

Abstract: Public ignorance around climate change remains high in many countries, including the United States, where in 2019 only 67% of adults reported to believe that global warming is happening. In this paper we show that information avoidance aimed at protecting identity contributes at explaining climate ignorance. Exploiting mass-layoffs of coal miners in the US and a difference-in-differences design we find that climate ignorance shrinks less in counties affected by the layoffs as compared to other coal-mining counties. An instrumental variable strategy that uses geographic variation in gas prices to predict mine closures strongly suggests that the layoffs causally impact beliefs about climate change. We also employ a triple difference-in-differences strategy that compares layoffs from coal and metal mines to understand the underlying causes of persistent climate change ignorance in communities experiencing layoffs. Our triple difference results confirm that information avoidance is specific to coal-mining communities suggesting that protecting identity plays an important role.

About the speakeR

Pamela Campa is an Associate Professor of Economics at SITE - Stockholm School of Economics. Before joining SITE she was an Assistant Professor at University of Calgary. She holds a PhD in Economics from the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University. She is also a Research Affiliate at CEPR (Labor, Public and Political Economy), the Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets (MISUM) and the Dondena Gender Initiative, and an invited researcher at J-PAL Europe.

Her research interests are in Political Economy, Environmental Economics and Gender Economics.