The aim of the project is to investigate the heterogeneous attitude of citizens towards the implementation of different tools of climate mitigation policy, taking into account their personal characteristics and, more importantly, their occupational exposure being able to affect their feelings about climate change issues. One clear evidence from both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence point that individuals show a heterogeneous willingness to accept sacrifices to contribute to the attainment of climate mitigation targets. The project tries to fill this gap by investigating how occupation exposure of individuals might reflect into heterogeneous willingness to support climate mitigation policies and how these results could be mediated by different domains of environmental attitudes observed across citizens. This research question arises from the fact that when assessing the effects of environmental policies on their daily life, individuals also evaluate their exposure on changes induced by green transition fearing of being displaced or not matching with the new skills requested. This could negatively affect the relative importance that individuals give to environmental problems compared to job security and could affect the effectiveness of the environmental policies.
In detail, our contribution to the literature is twofold.
We want to develop an original taxonomy of individuals based on their general attitudes toward climate change using data from the European Social Survey (2016). Concerning market labour variable, we want to construct an index of occupational exposure to environmental policies, taking into account the skills of the workers. Firstly, we estimate the average emissions released for each worker within
a given occupation. Secondly, we add Information on the occupational composition of sectors by country (Losc ) retrieved from the EU Labour Force Survey. The EU labour force survey has information by 2-digit NACE and1-digit ISCO.
Our second contribution will thus consists in providing econometric evidence about citizens¿ attitude towards different pro-climate policy tools by exploiting the heterogeneity across the previous clusters as well as the individuals¿ occupational exposure. (4-digit ISCO) to climate-related policies. The citizens¿ attitude towards climate mitigation programs is evaluated with respect to three different policy instruments: a carbon tax; a Pigouvian subsidy for renewable energy; a technology standard that bans the sale of energy-inefficient appliances.
Finally, our contribution to the extent literature would answer also to several answers related to a policy viewpoint, these results point out some possible suggestions. First, there are several different ways through which citizens consider and perceive the issue of climate change. Second, these different attitudes are reflected into heterogeneous willingness to support climate mitigation policies. Third, within each group, being employed in environmentally-relevant occupations implies a different support of climate mitigation policies.