Understanding how personal experience of extreme weather events raises awareness and concern about climate change has important policy implications. It has repeatedly been argued that proximising ...climate change through extreme weather events holds a promising strategy to increase engagement with the issue and encourage climate change action. In this paper, we exploit geo-referenced panel data on climate change attitudes as well as natural variation in flood and heatwave exposure in England and Wales to estimate the causal effect of extreme weather events on climate change attitudes and environmental behaviours using a difference-in-differences matching approach. Our findings suggest that personal experience with both flooding and heatwaves significantly increases risk perception towards climate change impacts but has no effect on climate change concern or pro-environmental behaviour, on average. Moreover, the findings indicate that the effect of flooding on risk perception is highly localised and diminishes at greater distances. For heatwaves, we find that the effect on risk perception is driven by the recent salient summer heatwaves of 2018 and 2019. Having experienced both events also significantly increases climate change concern and pro-environmental behaviour, in addition to risk perception.
We conducted a pre-registered randomised lab-in-the-field online experiment in Beijing, China, to explore the relationship between acute air pollution and anti-social behaviour. Our novel ...experimental design exploits naturally occurring discontinuities in pollution episodes to mimic an experimental setting in which pollution exposure is exogenously manipulated, thus allowing us to identify a causal relationship. Participants were randomly assigned to be surveyed on either high pollution or low pollution days, thereby exogenously varying the degree of pollution exposure. In addition, a subset of individuals surveyed on the high-pollution days received an additional ‘pollution alert’ to explore whether providing air pollution warnings influences (protective) behaviour. We used a set of well-established incentivised economic games to obtain clean measures of anti-social behaviour, as well as a range of secondary outcomes which may drive the proposed pollution-behaviour relationship. Our results indicate that exposure to acute air pollution had no statistically significant effect on anti-social behaviour, but significantly reduced both psychological and physiological well-being. However, these effects do not remain statistically significant after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing. We find no evidence that pollution affects cognitive ability, present bias, discounting, or risk aversion, four potential pathways which may explain the relationship between pollution and anti-social behaviour. Our study adds to the growing calls for purposefully designed and pre-registered experiments that strengthen experimental (as opposed to correlational or quasi-experimental) identification and thus allow causal insights into the relationship between pollution and anti-social behaviour.
•We experimentally explore the link between air pollution and anti-social behaviour.•Acute exposure had no statistically significant effect on anti-social behaviour.•Pollution marginally reduced both psychological and physiological well-being.•Pollution did not affect cognitive ability, time preferences, or risk aversion.•More purposefully designed experiments are needed for credible causal evidence.
We systematically examine the acute impact of exposure to a public health crisis on anti-social behaviour and economic decision-making using unique experimental panel data from China, collected just ...before the outbreak of COVID-19 and immediately after the first wave was overcome. Exploiting plausibly exogenous geographical variation in virus exposure coupled with a dataset of longitudinal experiments, we show that participants who were more intensely exposed to the virus outbreak became more anti-social than those with lower exposure, while other aspects of economic and social preferences remain largely stable. The finding is robust to multiple hypothesis testing and a similar, yet less pronounced pattern emerges when using alternative measures of virus exposure, reflecting societal concern and sentiment, constructed using social media data. The anti-social response is particularly pronounced for individuals who experienced an increase in depression or negative affect, which highlights the important role of psychological health as a potential mechanism through which the virus outbreak affected behaviour.
Getting to a net-zero emissions economy requires faster development and diffusion of novel clean energy technologies. We exploit a rare natural experiment to study the impact of an open-access ...mandate on the diffusion of scientific research into patented technologies. From 2014 onwards, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) required its 17 National Laboratories (NLs) to publish all peer-reviewed scientific articles without a paywall. Using data from more than 300,000 scientific publications between 2012 and 2018, we show that scientific articles subject to the mandate were used on average 42% more in patents, despite embargo periods of up to 12 months. We also show that articles subject to the mandate were not cited more frequently by other academic articles. Our findings suggest that the mandate primarily contributed to technological development but has not led to additional academic research. Lastly, we show that small firms were the primary beneficiaries of the increased diffusion of scientific knowledge.
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•We examine the impact of the U.S. Department of Energy’s open-access mandate•Scientific articles subject to the mandate were utilized on average 42% more in patents•Articles subject to the mandate were not cited more frequently by other academic papers•Small firms were the primary beneficiaries of the increased knowledge diffusion
Social sciences; Research methodology social science
Teams play a key role in tackling complex societal challenges, such as developing vaccines or novel clean energy technologies. Yet, the effect of air pollution on team performance in non-routine ...problem-solving tasks is not well explored. Here, we document a sizable adverse effect of air pollution on team performance using data from 15,000 live escape games in London, United Kingdom. On high-pollution days, teams take on average 5% more time to solve a sequence of non-routine analytical tasks, which require collaborative skills analogous to those needed in the modern workplace. Negative effects are non-linear and only occur at high levels of air pollution, which are however commonplace in many developing countries. As team efforts predominantly drive innovation, high levels of air pollution may significantly hamper economic development.
The plant family Bignoniaceae is a conspicuous and charismatic element of the tropical flora. The family has a complex taxonomic history, with substantial changes in the classification of the group ...during the past two centuries. Recent re-classifications at the tribal and generic levels have been largely possible by the availability of molecular phylogenies reconstructed using Sanger sequencing data. However, our complete understanding of the systematics, evolution, and biogeography of the family remains incomplete, especially due to the low resolution and support of different portions of the Bignoniaceae phylogeny. To overcome these limitations and increase the amount of molecular data available for phylogeny reconstruction within this plant family, we developed a bait kit targeting 762 nuclear genes, including 329 genes selected specifically for the Bignoniaceae; 348 genes obtained from the Angiosperms353 with baits designed specifically for the family; and, 85 low-copy genes of known function. On average, 77.4% of the reads mapped to the targets, and 755 genes were obtained per species. After removing genes with putative paralogs, 677 loci were used for phylogenetic analyses. On-target genes were compared and combined in the Exon-Only dataset, and on-target + off-target regions were combined in the Supercontig dataset. We tested the performance of the bait kit at different taxonomic levels, from family to species-level, using 38 specimens of 36 different species of Bignoniaceae, representing: 1) six (out of eight) tribal level-clades (e.g., Bignonieae, Oroxyleae, Tabebuia Alliance, Paleotropical Clade, Tecomeae, and Jacarandeae), only Tourrettieae and Catalpeae were not sampled; 2) all 20 genera of Bignonieae; 3) seven (out of nine) species of
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