On Thursday, September 11, Maxence Gérard will defend his thesis entitled “Beyond Pigou: Policies and Behavioral Levers to Regulate Meat-Related Externalities.”
This thesis addresses the regulation of environmental externalities associated with meat production and consumption. It aims both to propose second-best instruments when Pigouvian policies are not feasible and to explore how moral and social norms can be leveraged to influence consumer behavior.
In the first chapter, I study the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the cattle sector, accounting for the carbon opportunity cost of land use. Given the obstacles to implementing an emissions tax, I examine the efficiency of an alternative policy based on land retirement for ecosystem regeneration. I develop an analytical model to theoretically identify the conditions under which this policy outperforms other alternatives, such as a beef tax or a production standard. A calibration of the model to the French market shows that the land retirement policy generally yields greater welfare gains than the alternative policies considered.
The second chapter examines the impact of a tax and environmental information campaigns on the consumption of a polluting good by morally motivated individuals. I show that when the information implies a moderate behavioral change, individuals reduce their consumption to preserve a positive self-image. In contrast, the effect of a more alarming piece of information—i.e., one requiring a substantial behavioral shift—or that of a tax depends on consumers’ attitudes toward effort. For some individuals, such information is discouraging and leads to reduced effort and increased consumption, while a tax strengthens their motivation. For others, alarming information encourages continued effort, whereas the tax crowds out moral motivation through a moral licensing effect. This crowding-out effect can be mitigated, or even eliminated, by reducing the salience of the tax.
The third chapter explores the phenomenon of environmental backlash, motivated by the emergence of social groups that place meat at the core of their identity in response to the rise of vegetarianism. I develop a model in which consumers, heterogeneous in the degree to which they internalize their environmental impact, choose either to conform to the prevailing social norm or to follow their individual preferences while incurring social stigma. Emancipated individuals who consume less than the norm are seen as pro-environmental, whereas those who consume more are perceived as conservative. The analysis shows that a greater environmental impact induces preference dispersion, which can lead to the emergence of a pro-environmental group. This tends to reduce the social norm and rise the conformity cost of large consumers, triggering a backlash with the rise of a conservative group. The model further predicts that increasing social pressure to conform on the least virtuous individuals can be counterproductive, as it leads to a rise in both the number of conservatives and aggregate pollution.
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