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 Sebastien Houde.

He will present his work titled The Moral Cost of Carbon, joint with Corinne Faure and Joachim Schleich

Abstract:

We define the concept of moral cost of carbon (MCC): the internal carbon price that people implicitly apply to their consumption decisions. We argue that the MCC is a key metric for policy design. The gap between MCC and an actual carbon price tells us how much the carbon externality should be priced. It also revealed the political barriers to implementing a broad-based carbon pricing scheme. We propose an experimental approach to measure the MCC among a target population. A key challenge is that information gaps and the choice environment could have large impacts and confound its elicitation. Our experimental design aims to address these problems. In particular, we show how malleable the MCC is with respect to extrinsic incentives.

About the speakeR

Sebastien Houde received his PhD from Stanford University. He is an environmental and energy economist. His research explores themes at the nexus of energy, climate, and sustainability issues and digitalization, innovation and technology, industrial organization, and behavioral economics. Methodologically, his expertise is in structural econometric modeling, Big Data econometrics, and field experiments. He is particularly interested in research projects where data, technologies, behaviors, and environmental/energy policies come into play. Before joining the Department of Economics at HEC Lausanne, I worked at Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM), ETH Zürich, the University of Maryland (AREC), Resources for the Future, and Natural Resources Canada.