Bertrand Verheyden

With growing emphasis on sustainable practices, carbon taxes and congestion charges are emerging as key tools to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality, yet they often face public resistance. Using longitudinal data from a randomized survey experiment in Luxembourg, this paper investigates whether providing relevant information about these two green mobility policies influences pro-environmental attitudes (stated support and willingness to pay for the carbon tax) and behaviors (carbon offsetting donations). The first treatment, which informs participants that public support for urban congestion charges tends to increase after implementation, has little to no effect. In contrast, information on the use of carbon tax revenues (redistribution and energy-efficient investments) has a large positive impact on both stated and revealed pro-environmental preferences. Our results indicate that support for the carbon tax is more elastic to information on its redistributive aspect, rather than on its use for funding green projects. Additionally, constraints to behavioral change and pre-treatment environmental attitudes play a role in treatment response heterogeneity, and show that confirmation bias can moderate responses to information, especially among those skeptical of climate science.

Spending time together with a spouse is a major gain from marriage. We extend the classical collective model of the household to allow for togetherness between spouses. Togetherness takes the form of joint leisure and joint care for children. Using revealed preferences conditions, we find that Dutch households are willing to pay €1.2 per hour - 10% of the average wage - to convert private leisure to joint, and €2.1 per hour to convert private childcare to joint. Our results suggest that togetherness is an important component of household time use despite it being overlooked in the economics literature.

We develop a multiple-events model and exploit within and between country variation in the timing, type and level of intensity of various non-pharmaceutical interventions to study their dynamic effects on the daily incidence of COVID-19 and on population mobility patterns across 135 countries. Taking into account the contemporaneous presence of multiple interventions, we remove concurrent policy bias from the effect of each policy of interest, and we establish that policies curb the epidemic by changing population mobility patterns in a manner consistent with time-use and epidemiologically relevant considerations. We are thus able to shed light on the mechanisms through which confinement measures contribute to "flattening the curve".

We develop a multiple-events model and exploit within and between country variation in the timing, type and level of intensity of various non-pharmaceutical interventions to study their dynamic effects on the daily incidence of COVID-19 and on population mobility patterns across 135 countries. Taking into account the contemporaneous presence of multiple interventions, we remove concurrent policy bias from the effect of each policy of interest, and we establish that policies curb the epidemic by changing population mobility patterns in a manner consistent with time-use and epidemiologically relevant considerations. We are thus able to shed light on the mechanisms through which confinement measures contribute to "flattening the curve".

This paper analyzes the impact of anticipated old age support, provided by children to parents, on intra-family transfers and education. We highlight an education motive for remittances, according to which migrants have an incentive to invest in their siblings' education via transfers to parents, in order to better share the burden of old age support. Our theory shows that in rich families, selfish parents invest optimally in children education, while in poor families, liquidity constraints are binding and education is fostered by migrant remittances. We test these hypotheses on Indian panel data. Identification is based on within variation in household composition. We find that remittances received from migrants significantly increase with the number of school age children in the household. Retrieving the effects of household characteristics shows that more remittances tend to be sent to poorer and older household heads, confirming the old age support hypothesis.

Recent empirical evidence links migrant remittances and return migration, and stresses the impact of uncertainty on migrant decisions. Theoretical analyses of t