Using survey-based choice experiments, we find that willingness to pay (WTP) for cap-and-trade programs depends upon their distributional impacts, including changes in the numbers of carbon-intensive versus green jobs and whether there will be additional regulations to limit non-global co-pollutant emissions from firms that buy permits. We estimate a model suitable for out-of-sample forecasting of WTP in other regions nationally, where systematic heterogeneity is captured by predicted county-level climate-change attitudes from the Yale Climate Map project.
We explore the relationship between willingness to pay (WTP) for climate change mitigation and distributional preferences, by which we mean individuals' opinions about who should be responsible for climate change prevention and whether the share of climate change impacts borne by the poor is a cause for concern. WTP is higher when larger cost shares are borne by parties deemed to bear a greater responsibility for mitigation, and when respondents believe (and care) that the impacts of climate change may be borne disproportionately by the world's poor.