TY  - BOOK
AU  - Anderson,Soren T.
AU  - Marinescu,Ioana
AU  - Shor,Boris
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Can Pigou at the Polls Stop Us Melting the Poles?
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2019///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - August 2019; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Surveys show majority U.S. support for a carbon tax. Yet none has been adopted. Why? We study two failed carbon tax initiatives in Washington State in 2016 and 2018. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that Washington's real-world campaigns reduced support by 20 percentage points. Resistance to higher energy prices explains opposition to these policies in the average precinct, while ideology explains 90% of the variation in votes across precincts. Conservatives preferred the 2016 revenue-neutral policy, while liberals preferred the 2018 green-spending policy. Yet we forecast both initiatives would fail in other states, demonstrating that surveys are overly optimistic
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w26146
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w26146
ER  -