Many environmental challenges require the use of economic instruments aimed at changing people’s (and firms’) behavior. Identifying such economic instruments, including their optimal level of stringency, and evaluating, ex post, their (cost-)effectiveness is one of economists’ main tasks. However, economists are increasingly realizing that examining the functioning of policies may represent the easy part. Getting the general public and policymakers to support these policies, even if very well founded, is often the hard part.

This Winter School aims at bringing students to the frontier of the literature, to ensure that future research is as innovative as possible, and that the frontier of knowledge moves as fast as society needs it to do. The Winter School also has a strong methodological focus, to ensure that the research produced by the cohort of students attending it is rigorous and provides actionable insights to policymakers, with an eye on scale and scalability. The Winter School provides lessons on the design of experiments along the continuum (from lab experiment to natural field experiment), survey design, elicitation of beliefs, and benefits and drawbacks of revealed versus stated preferences, and policy evaluation and the causal analysis of public support.

Lessons from other disciplines, including political science and psychology, are also introduced to complement insights from economics. Finally, the Winter School aims at creating a community of scholars with a shared interest in understanding people’s understanding of environmental policies, how it shapes society, and how it may be improved.

School’s website.