Weathering Heights
What drives us to go green: The roles of narcissism, virtue signaling and social exclusion
Shayan Shaikh & Nicholas Ashill
Personality and Individual Differences, December 2025
Abstract:
Understanding individual differences in pro-environmental values is crucial amid climate change. This study explores how grandiose and vulnerable narcissism relate to such values, using survey data from 609 British participants. Our findings reveal that grandiose narcissism is positively associated with pro-environmental values and virtue signaling mediates this relationship. This suggests that individuals high in grandiose narcissism may adopt pro-environmental values primarily to enhance their self-image. Conversely, although vulnerable narcissism shows a negative direct relationship with pro-environmental values, vulnerable narcissists also engage in virtue signaling, which positively influences their adoption of pro-environmental values. This indicates that their motivation may stem from a need to protect their fragile self-esteem. Additionally, while grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism differ in how they relate to social exclusion, social exclusion does not significantly predict pro-environmental values. This implies that the emotional consequences of exclusion may not support the internalization of pro-environmental values. By highlighting the distinct motivational pathways of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, this study deepens understanding of how self-focused traits influence environmental value adoption.
Threat of China's Nuclear Dominance Boosts Americans' Support for Nuclear Energy
Ransi Clark, Beatrice Magistro & Michael Alvarez
Caltech Working Paper, June 2025
Abstract:
Sections of the American public are skeptical of radiation safety. This skepticism can be challenging to the expansion of nuclear capacity in the United States despite its benefit as a stable source of clean energy. Here we implement a survey experiment to determine what information is most persuasive to reducing this skepticism. Informing respondents about China's aggressive construction of nuclear plants and the United States' premature closures boosts support for both license renewal of existing plants and building new nuclear plants. Moreover, under this information frame the majority of the sample supported both policies. A separate information frame that posed nuclear energy as necessary for achieving net-zero goals only raised support for license renewal of existing plants but not building new plants. Both frames equally increased support for nuclear energy among women and Democratic party voters, groups that are generally more skeptical of nuclear energy. The threat of China's dominance boosted nuclear support among several additional groups such as Independent voters and middle-aged voters that the clean energy frame did not. Our experiment demonstrates that respondents averse to nuclear risk can support nuclear energy by weighing risk-benefit trade-offs without necessarily receiving information about why the risks are negligible.
A Cold Stop: Temperature, Unemployment and Joblessness Dynamics
Joshua Graff Zivin et al.
NBER Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
We provide new evidence that short-run temperature shocks affect unemployment dynamics. Linking daily weather data with three decades of Current Population Survey microdata, we show that cold, but not hot, temperatures significantly increase unemployment risk. This effect is concentrated in climate-exposed industries and driven by both increased job separations and longer unemployment durations. Separations appear to be driven by a rise in layoffs rather than quits, while the increase in unemployment duration is largely explained by a decline in employer vacancy postings. Taken together, temperature-induced joblessness dynamics are primarily demand-driven, rather than a result of changes in worker behavior.
Tariffs as Environmental Protection: Evidence from the Global South after the China Garbage Shock
Rachel Wellhausen
British Journal of Political Science, November 2025
Abstract:
In the global waste trade, importers buy containers of waste and scrap to meet demand for raw materials, especially in the Global South. But post-processing leftovers generate localized negative externalities. I use the waste trade as a setting to establish that low-capacity states can and do use tariffs as a tool in their environmental policy repertoire. Product-level tariffs can serve as Pigouvian ’sin’ taxes that incentivize private market actors to limit transactions and/or increase state revenue, both channels that can result in improved environmental outcomes. For evidence, I leverage the ‘China garbage shock’: in 2017 China banned imports of twenty-six waste products (HS six-digit), which disrupted economic–environmental trade-offs in other, newly competitive markets awash in diverted imports. Using novel data on 179 traded waste products and product-level tariffs (1996–2020), I demonstrate that those that received the shock raised tariffs in ways consistent with environmental protection.
Technological pathways for cost-effective steel decarbonization
Xinyi Wu et al.
Nature, 6 November 2025, Pages 93-101
Abstract:
The iron and steel sector is central to national net-zero efforts but remains hard to abate. Existing decarbonization roadmaps fail to guide technology choices for individual plants, given their heterogeneity and economic constraints. Here, by integrating two global plant-level datasets and forecasted technology costs, we develop a model to identify the least-cost technology pathway for each plant worldwide in alignment with national carbon-neutrality targets. In the short term (pre-2030), energy efficiency improvements and scrap reuse are the cheapest decarbonization strategies, reducing cumulative global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 7.8 Gt and 7.2 Gt at average costs of –US$8.5 per tCO2 and US$0.3 per tCO2, respectively. In the long term (after 2030), smelt reduction with carbon capture is expected to become technically mature and economically viable, achieving approximately 6.0 Gt of CO2 reductions at costs of US$7–15 per tCO2 in Chinese plants and US$26–75 per tCO2 in plants across Japan, Korea and Europe. After 2040, green-hydrogen-based steelmaking is estimated to contribute an additional 0.3 Gt of CO2 abatement in European plants at costs of US$27–44 per tCO2. This study tailors plant-specific least-cost technology pathways that reconcile stakeholders’ economic interests with climate objectives, enabling actionable decarbonization strategies and supporting global net-zero targets.
Environmental Catastrophe and the Direction of Invention: Evidence from the American Dust Bowl
Jacob Moscona
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
This paper investigates how innovation responded to and shaped the economic impact of the American Dust Bowl, an environmental catastrophe that led to widespread soil erosion on the US Plains during the 1930s. Combining data on county-level erosion, the historical geography of crop production, and crop-specific innovation, I document that in the wake of the environmental crisis, agricultural technology development was strongly and persistently re-directed toward more Dust Bowl-exposed crops and, within crops, toward bio-chemical and planting technologies that could directly mitigate economic losses from environmental distress. County-level exposure to Dust Bowl-induced innovation significantly dampened the effect of land erosion on agricultural land values and revenue. These results highlight the role of crises in spurring innovation and the importance of endogenous technological progress as an adaptive force in the face of disasters.
Market Demand, Competition for Knowledge Workers, and Impact on Invention: Evidence from Electric Vehicle Technologies
Jino Lu
Organization Science, November-December 2025, Pages 2459-2479
Abstract:
Strategy and innovation scholars have long emphasized the positive role of market demand in driving innovation within a technological domain. This study sheds light on an indirect negative spillover effect of market demand on technological progress: whereas increased downstream market demand within a domain generally drives increased technological progress in that domain (i.e., the demand-relevant domain), it may also adversely affect the technological progress of firms in adjacent domains. This occurs because the increased technological progress within the demand-relevant domain, driven by the downstream market demand, can intensify competition for skilled knowledge workers — a critical innovation resource whose supply is often inelastic in the short term. Empirically, I test these arguments by exploiting an unexpected environmental policy shock — the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate — which led to an exogenous increase in demand for electric vehicle (EV) technologies. Following the ZEV mandate, I find evidence of increased inventive activities in the EV domain by EV firms. However, firms in adjacent (non-EV) domains were more likely to lose knowledge workers to EV firms following the ZEV mandate. Consequently, these affected firms produced 22% fewer inventions, particularly in their core technological areas, and became 19% less likely to explore new technological areas. Notably, affected firms in growing technological domains, such as renewable energy, and smaller, younger firms were more adversely (or at least equally) impacted.
Planes Overhead: How Airplane Noise Impacts Home Values
Florian Allroggen et al.
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
Air transportation supports economic growth and global connectivity but imposes localized environmental costs, particularly through aircraft noise. We estimate the causal effect of aviation noise on housing prices using quasi-experimental variation from the Federal Aviation Administration's rollout of performance-based navigation (PBN) procedures and runway reconfigurations at three major U.S. airports. Combining high-resolution flight trajectory data with geocoded housing transactions, we apply a difference-in-differences hedonic framework to identify changes in exposure unanticipated by residents. A one-decibel increase in annual day-night average sound level reduces house prices by 0.6 to 1.0 percent. Among alternative noise metrics, average exposure explains property value impacts most strongly. Willingness to pay for quieter conditions varies systematically with income and race, indicating that aircraft noise externalities have meaningful distributional consequences. Our results highlight the need to incorporate localized environmental costs into aviation and urban land-use policy.