[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/i4rdps/58.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Yellow Vests, Pessimistic Beliefs, and Carbon Tax Aversion (2022): A Comment

Author

Listed:
  • Rivers, Nicholas
  • Woerman, Matt
  • Yassin, Kareman
Abstract
Douenne and Fabre (2022) implement a representative survey following the Yellow Vests movement in France that started in opposition to the carbon tax in 2018. They find that a majority of French citizens would oppose a carbon tax and dividend program with proceeds paid equally to each adult. The authors further find that respondents have pessimistic beliefs about several aspects of the policy. They then show how informational treatments cause respondents to update these beliefs, and they finally estimate the causal effect of these beliefs on support for the policy. In this note, we focus on the second section of this paper: the causal effects of feedback on beliefs. Based on elicited household characteristics, Douenne and Fabre (2022) estimate whether each household "wins" or "loses" from the carbon tax and dividend reform. They provide this binary (win vs. lose) information to households and subsequently ask households to evaluate whether they believe they would financially benefit from the policy. By exploiting the discontinuity in win vs. lose feedback, they assess the degree to which feedback affects subjective beliefs, finding that a household that is told it will "win" as a result of the reform increases its subjective belief that it will not lose by about 25 percentage points. The subset of households that is part of the Yellow Vests movement, however, revises its subjective belief of not losing upwards by only 10 percentage points after being told that it will "win" from the carbon tax reform. Conversely, households who initially support the tax increase this belief by 41 percentage points when told they will "win." In this note we replicate this second section of the paper-the causal effects of feedback on beliefs- using the processed data provided by the authors. We successfully replicate the average treatment effect, but we find that the heterogeneous treatment effects may be biased due to model misspecification. While our results support the conclusion that these estimated effects depend on a household's attitudes toward the policy, we find that the source of heterogeneity differs. Further, we note two changes to the analysis that we believe are appropriate (which do not affect the conclusions drawn): first, some (1.8%) of observations in the dataset appear to be misclassified-wrongly coded as if a household would "lose" when in fact they would "win"-and second, the main causal analysis is based on a regression discontinuity design, but does not include standard components of such a design (e.g., a RD plot, optimal selection of bandwidth, density analysis, placebo tests). We update the design to address both of these points. We find results that generally support the main conclusions of Douenne and Fabre (2022), but we urge caution when interpreting the heterogeneous treatment effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Rivers, Nicholas & Woerman, Matt & Yassin, Kareman, 2023. "Yellow Vests, Pessimistic Beliefs, and Carbon Tax Aversion (2022): A Comment," I4R Discussion Paper Series 58, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:58
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/275821/1/I4R-DP058.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Matias D. Cattaneo & Rocío Titiunik, 2022. "Regression Discontinuity Designs," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 14(1), pages 821-851, August.
    2. Sebastian Calonico & Matias D. Cattaneo & Max H. Farrell & Rocío Titiunik, 2019. "Regression Discontinuity Designs Using Covariates," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 101(3), pages 442-451, July.
    3. Matias D. Cattaneo & Luke Keele & Rocio Titiunik, 2021. "Covariate Adjustment in Regression Discontinuity Designs," Papers 2110.08410, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2022.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yoichi Arai & Taisuke Otsu & Myung Hwan Seo, 2021. "Regression Discontinuity Design with Potentially Many Covariates," Papers 2109.08351, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2024.
    2. Shi, Xunpeng & Tian, Binbin & Yang, Longjian & Yu, Jian & Zhou, Siyang, 2023. "How do regulatory environmental policies perform? A case study of China's Top-10,000 enterprises energy-saving program," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 187(C).
    3. Frederik von Waldow & Heike Link, 2024. "Spatial Competition and Pass-through of Fuel Taxes: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment in Germany," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 2086, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    4. Fürstenau, Elisabeth & Gohl, Niklas & Haan, Peter & Weinhardt, Felix, 2023. "Working life and human capital investment: Causal evidence from a pension reform," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    5. Peveri, Julieta & Sangnier, Marc, 2023. "Gender differences in re-contesting decisions: New evidence from French municipal elections," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 214(C), pages 574-594.
    6. Geloso, Vincent & Kufenko, Vadim & Arsenault-Morin, Alex P., 2023. "The lesser shades of labor coercion: The impact of seigneurial tenure in nineteenth-century Quebec," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 163(C).
    7. Cropper, Maureen & Suri, Palak, 2024. "Measuring the air pollution benefits of public transport projects," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    8. Eggers, Andrew C. & Ellison, Martin & Lee, Sang Seok, 2021. "The economic impact of recession announcements," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 40-52.
    9. Ruiqi Rich Zhu & Cheng He & Yu Jeffrey Hu, 2023. "The Effect of Product Recommendations on Online Investor Behaviors," Papers 2303.14263, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2023.
    10. Fontana, Nicola & Nannicini, Tommaso & Tabellini, Guido, 2023. "Historical roots of political extremism: The effects of Nazi occupation of Italy," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 723-743.
    11. Cappelletti, Matilde & Giuffrida, Leonardo M., 2021. "Procuring survival," ZEW Discussion Papers 21-093, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    12. Somdeep Chatterjee & Pushkar Maitra & Manhar Manchanda, 2024. "The Relevant Third: Threat of Coalition and Economic Development," Monash Economics Working Papers 2024-13, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    13. de Bruijn, Ernst-Jan & Vethaak, Heike & Koning, Pierre & Knoef, Marike, 2023. "Debt Relief for the Financially Vulnerable: Impact on Employment, Welfare Receipt, and Mental Health," IZA Discussion Papers 16336, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. Matias D. Cattaneo & Rocío Titiunik, 2022. "Regression Discontinuity Designs," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 14(1), pages 821-851, August.
    15. Ayad, Fayssal, 2023. "Mapping the path forward: A prospective model of natural resource depletion and sustainable development," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 85(PA).
    16. Machado, Anaely & Terra, Rafael & Tannuri-Pianto, Maria, 2024. "Higher education responses to accountability," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    17. Mari, Gabriele, 2023. "Less for more? Cuts to child benefits, family adjustments, and long-run child outcomes in larger families," SocArXiv e3n82, Center for Open Science.
    18. Crespo Cristian, 2020. "Beyond Manipulation: Administrative Sorting in Regression Discontinuity Designs," Journal of Causal Inference, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 164-181, January.
    19. Bragança, Arthur & Dahis, Ricardo, 2022. "Cutting special interests by the roots: Evidence from the Brazilian Amazon," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 215(C).
    20. Blaise Melly & Rafael Lalive, 2020. "Estimation, Inference, and Interpretation in the Regression Discontinuity Design," Diskussionsschriften dp2016, Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:58. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.i4replication.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.