Bard College Berlin News
Professor of Economics Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg publishes “Pro environmental behavior and life satisfaction: How strong is our evidence?” in Ecological Economics
The paper contributes to the agenda of behavioral & ecological economics by taking a more explicit approach to making causal inferences in the presence of merely cross-sectional data, something that is often ignored in traditional work in ecological economics or environmental psychology. Inspired by insights from experimental approaches to economic behavior, the paper spells out what conditions need to be met for observational research to allow for causal inference even in the absence of strong causal designs such as IV or DID. Using power analyses, equivalence testing as well as Pearl’s approach to causal identification and the resulting directed acyclic graphs and explicit discussion of selection of control variables, the authors hope to help the field in improving the application of commonly used regression analysis and put the literature on pro-environmental behavior and well-being on a more solid footing.
Access the paper here.
Post Date: 07-14-2025