Economics Insights @ CBS

Public opinion polls reveal that the perception of climate change as an uncertain phenomenon is increasing, even as consensus has increased within the scientific community of its reality and its attribution to human causes. At the same time, the scientific community has sought to improve its communication practices, in order to present a more accurate picture to the public and policy makers of the state of scientific knowledge about climate change. In this review article, we examine two sets of insights that could influence the success of such communication efforts.

In this article, we review empirical research investigating the efficacy of perspective-taking — the active consideration of others' mental states and subjective experiences — as a strategy for navigating intergroup environments. We begin by describing some of the benefits accrued from perspective-taking: more favorable implicit and explicit intergroup evaluations, stronger approach-oriented action tendencies and positive non-verbal behaviors, increased intergroup helping, reduced reliance on stereotype-maintaining mental processes, and heightened recognition of intergroup disparities.

We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country?s U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions, country-specific economic factors, liquidity of the country?s bond, and political risk. We then extract the part of the sovereign spread that is due to political risk, making use of political risk ratings.

A recent surge of research has investigated the potential of pro-environmental behavior interventions to affect other pro-environmental behaviors not initially targeted by the intervention. The evidence evaluating these spillover effects has been mixed, with some studies finding evidence for positive spillover (i.e., one pro-environmental behavior increases the likelihood of performing additional pro-environmental behaviors) and others finding negative spillover (i.e., one pro-environmental behavior decreases the likelihood of additional pro-environmental behaviors).