Performative State Capacity and Climate (In)Action
Download Paper Abstract Climate action requires significant public and private sector investments to achieve meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. This paper documents that austerity, coupled with a lack of (digital) skills in (local) government, may have been a significant barrier to delivering climate action in the form of retrofitting. Decomposing heterogeneity in estimated treatment effects of a large scale energy efficiency program rolled out through a regression discontinuity design in the early 2010s, we find that both the extent of local budget cuts and poor digital connectivity may be responsible for up to 30% fewer retrofit installations that counterfactually would have taken place....