@article{Environmental:3002,
      recid = {3002},
      author = {Lee, Seunghoon},
      title = {Essays on Household Responses to Environmental Policies},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-06},
      pages = {120},
      abstract = {An increasing number of governments implement market-based  environmental policies because, in theory, such policies  can incentivize economic agents to undertake socially  desirable activities for their own good ("harnessing market  power"). Whether this claim is true or not, however,  critically hinges on the design of the policy:  specifically, whether it aligns private benefit to socially  desirable outcomes. To that respect, understanding economic  agents' responses to market-based environmental policies is  important to evaluate a welfare impact. This dissertation  studies how the household responds to various  incentive-based climate change mitigation and adaptation  policies and investigate such responses implication for  social welfare. 

The first chapter studies if easing  information friction in the housing market regarding flood  risk could reduce the population in high-risk areas and  thus flood damage. By exploiting the staggered adoption of  the Home Seller Disclosure Requirement across 27 states, I  first show this policy reduces the average price of  properties and population by 6\% and 9\% while increases  the number of flood insurance policy counts by 40\% in  high-risk areas. Further, I construct a novel and objective  measure of flood size using a method from hydrology and  estimate the effect of the disclosure policy on flood  damage conditional on flood size. I find the policy reduces  damage from small-to-moderate-sized floods by an average of  9.8\% in the treated communities. 

In the second chapter,  I study household response to a unit based food waste tax  scheme (UPS) in South Korea and its welfare implications.  By exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the UPS  status of each municipality due to a central government's  initiative, I first show that the UPS reduces food waste by  27\% on average where 1/3 of the observed reduction in food  waste is attributable to higher illegal dumping. Then,  using consumer panel data on grocery shopping, I find that  households reduce their grocery purchase by 3.5\% after the  UPS, which explains another 1/3 of the food waste  reduction. Further, I calculate the lower bound of the  welfare effect focusing on reduction in GHGs emissions and  show that the policy creates a substantial welfare gain  because benefits from the environmentally advantageous  changes in consumption patterns dominate losses from  illegal dumping.

In the last chapter, I investigate the  importance of pricing on the conservation effort. Many  public service usages are measured and thus are charged at  a group level. Such a pricing scheme sets a private  marginal cost lower than a group marginal cost which leads  to free-riding and overuse of the services. Using  apartment-level panel data, I find that switching from the  group pricing to individual pricing leads to a 20\%  reduction in per unit food waste quantity. Further, the  policy effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity along with  group size, apartment price, and pre-treatment food waste  quantity. Finally, I estimate the social cost of  free-riding with an emphasis on government finance and  greenhouse gas emission implications.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3002},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3002},
}