Bringing About Pro-Environment Behavior Through Policies and Social Norms

Abstract

As human population and consumption have risen, waste generation and air pollution have also increased leading to steady environmental degradation. To stem overflowing landfills and combat air pollution, policies and social norms have often been used as tools to bring about change. My dissertation analyzes the impact of these tools to achieve pro-environment behavior. The first chapter tries to understand two such behaviors, i.e., how to increase recycling and reduce waste. They are key to protecting natural resources, but households probably do not derive any benefit from recycling other than social approval. Based on a theoretical model I built for households, I show that when the social norm of recycling increases, the recycling rate of the household rises and waste per capita falls. My paper is one of the first to test these propositions empirically for Minnesota data using an instrumental variable setup. I show that while waste per capita declines significantly with an increase in social capital, recycling rate does not seem to be influenced by social capital. My second chapter studies the impact of environmental regulations in India on mortality that includes all causes and all ages (or mortality). We know that chronic exposure to air pollution is more harmful to adults than babies and hence focus on mortality as the outcome, for the first time for India. Using a difference-in-differences framework, in the first part of the paper, I show that environmental regulations in India have led to a significant drop in mortality. The second part analyzes the effect of different pollution types on mortality, where I show that PM2:5 exposure is more harmful to mortality (but not infant mortality) than TSP. This further strengthens the claim that policies should focus on adults and shift its focus from TSP to PM2:5 to get greater gains in health. The last chapter studies the functional form of the relationship between PM2:5 concentrations and mortality for the first time for India. The shape of this concentration-response curve will determine if the air in India affects public health at a different or the same rate as the U.S. baseline rate. My paper is one of the first studies to analyze this relationship using panel data for India, without simply extrapolating coefficients from U.S. or European data, following a rigorous identification strategy. I then arrive at the relative risk of mortality estimates at higher pollution concentrations as well as the estimated lives saved due to the reduction in pollution exposure.