Katherine Hassett

• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

Despite the large potential of dietary shifts to mitigate climate change and other environmental impacts, achieving such shifts is complex, as household food choices carry cultural and personal significance. This working paper identifies the role and relative importance of a number of determinants of households’ food consumption choices using data...

This paper offers insights on the factors that determine household choices related to energy use, based on data from the third OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change (EPIC). The analysis profiles households according to patterns in reported energy use and investment in energy related technologies, assesses the factors...

This paper offers new insights on household choices related to transport, based on data from the third OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change (EPIC). The analysis explores the role of key factors determining the choice of fuel type in vehicles and the choice of transport mode in trips. The study uses choice experiment...

Household choices – such as what to eat, how to get to work and how to heat our homes – have significant implications for the environment. With the urgency of environmental action and the need to shift to more sustainable consumption patterns, making more sustainable choices holds great potential to reduce environmental impacts. Yet in the context...

The third OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change (EPIC) explores households’ environmental attitudes and actions in the areas of energy, transport, waste and food systems across nine OECD countries. This overview chapter presents the main findings, including insights into the current state of public opinion on these e...

Households worldwide account for nearly a quarter of all energy use globally, with OECD household energy use responsible for 14% of all OECD carbon dioxide emissions in 2019. This chapter analyses responses from the third round of the OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change (EPIC) on households' residential energy use...

Our transport activity is currently responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and has a wide range of other environmental, health and social costs. This chapter analyses households’ transport choices, based on their responses to the 2022 OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change (EPIC). It explo...

Growing volumes of municipal solid waste threaten environmental quality and pose environmental safety hazards. Food waste is an important component of household waste, contributing to between 8-10% of total greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter presents observations from the third round of the OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual H...

Food systems emit around one third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs), with livestock production accounting for 32% of all agricultural emissions. This chapter summarises responses to questions on food consumption in the third round of the OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change (EPIC). The chapter analyse...

This report takes stock of scientific findings to date regarding the distributional effects of policies discouraging car use in urban areas. These policies include cordon tolls, distance-based charges, fuel taxes, parking measures and public transport subsidies. The report describes the mechanisms responsible for the distributional effects of these...

Behavioral public administration theory suggests that seemingly irrelevant word choice manipulations can influence behavior. We contend that the power of words has frequently been overlooked in the COVID-19 crisis. Given that most decisions mobilize System 1 cognition, words can be an important tool in pursuing socially-desirable outcomes. Beyond t...

Environmental amenities provide a range of direct and indirect benefits in cities, and amenity provision often figures within policy portfolios to advance sustainability in urban areas. As environmental pressures and urban populations increase, it will be necessary to find ways to ensure that environmental policies do not contribute to existing ine...

Average population density has been a traditional urban sprawl indicator, but it is insufficient to encapsulate its detrimental impacts. We demonstrate that cities of identical average population density may be subject to very different levels of car dependency, CO2 emissions and public budget deficits. To capture this, we shed light into the prope...

The conventional wisdom summarized in the adage ‘misery loves company’ suggests that suffering can be made easier to bear if it is also shared by others. Given increasing interest in subjective well-being and happiness as constituents of national wealth and priorities in policy-making and organizational management, we empirically investigate the va...

Could a widespread proliferation of ridesharing services mitigate or exacerbate the carbon footprint of urban passenger transport? Despite having profound policy implications, this question has not yet been answered in the literature. This paper examines that impact ex-ante, by simulating the aggregate travel demand, the choice of transport mode an...

Many organizations, especially businesses, make heavy use of euphemisms when communicating on sensitive issues. We explore whether the use of euphemisms, as opposed to equivalent plain terms, influences the moral judgments made by recipients of these messages, notably pertaining to (un)ethical behaviors in corporate social responsibility (CSR) prac...

The nexus between the residential sector and environmental quality is reciprocal and complex. The residential sector generates environmental impacts via land and materials use, energy consumption and the transport activity it engenders. Environmentally motivated policies on land-use, construction and energy efficiency, and transport seek to allevia...

Policy action to avoid the impending societal costs of climate change is particularly warranted in transport sector, which is responsible for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions in OECD countries. To design appropriate interventions in this sector, policy makers should account for the recent emergence of shared mobility services in urban areas and thei...

Health messaging interventions frequently make three well-intentioned but mistaken choices in their communications strategies. To increase their persuasiveness, these messages frequently call attention to the greatest possible numbers of people engaging in undesirable behavior, victims of this behavior, and reasons why one should change the behavio...

We propose that words can be an object of systematic study in the field of economics and outline an approach to the study of word choice in behavioral economics. We consider words as strategic instruments of influence and review how they can impact behaviors in several subtle and distinctive ways, namely through their capacity to elicit affect, sup...

Campaigns aiming to encourage people to reduce their energy consumption frequently make three well-intentioned but inadvertent mistakes in their communications strategies. These mistakes are driven by a deeply embedded yet often counterproductive popular intuition: that ‘more is better.’ We identify three messaging pitfalls that can result from thi...

In light of the growing attention that social norm interventions have garnered as policy tools, we review the current body of evidence on their effectiveness with respect to pro-environmental behaviors. We identify the various conceptualizations of social norms currently in use and inventory the experimental economics and social psychology literatu...

An important part of the debate about self vs. state-governance involves a discussion about enforcement mechanisms. While some scholars argue that private enforcement mechanisms work sufficiently well in supporting cooperation, others cite the downfalls of private mechanisms so as to legitimize government enforcement. This paper focuses on the inte...

In the 1960s and 1970's, prominent environmental disasters seemed to mobilize the U.S. public, and many key environmental laws were subsequently enacted. Theories surrounding public opinion formation, however, generally regard single events as unlikely to impact attitudes in a major way. Given the conflicting evidence provided by anecdotal accounts...

Given that private rewards have mixed effectiveness in the realm of prosocial behaviours (Bénabou and Tirole, 2006), we explore whether a ‘public’ reward (denominated in additional units of public good provision) successfully encourages prosocial behaviour in the form of increased donations to a project aimed at improving atmospheric air quality. O...

As national standards require increased use of renewable transportation fuels by 2022, Maine is positioned to be a leader in wood-based cellulosic ethanol production and use. Caroline Noblet, Mario Teisl, Katherine Farrow, and Jonathan Rubin consider Mainers’ willingness to accept and use biofuels. They document the current level of consumer knowle...

This thesis consists of two parts, the first of which examines a demand-side aspect of the emerging biofuels market by estimating New England residents' willingness-to-pay for cellulosic ethanol as a fuel source. Survey results of a conjoint analysis scenario point to positive, though modest, levels of willingness-to-pay among New England residents...