Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The interest in sustainability has risen in recent times where several instruments have been put in place to decrease environmental degradation. An up-to-date, as well as a less financially demanding sustainability instrument, is nudging. A nudge is an intervention trying to enhance certain consumer or resident behaviour without affecting economic incentives or forbidding other options. A housing company in Uppsala, Sweden, has introduced nudging in one of their neighbourhoods to increase waste sorting as the area suffered low waste sorting rates before the nudge. This has been done by comparing a yearly survey of tenants’ perceptions of their possibility to act environmentally friendly before and after the nudge. To guarantee that the effect is because of the nudge and not any time effect, 12 other areas, chosen on geographical proximity, have been used as a control group. The method consisted of one unconditional Difference-in-Difference and one conditional Difference-in-Difference including control variables. Tenant’s perception of their ability to act environmentally friendly was positively affected by the nudge in both the standard DiD-regressions and in the conditional DiD-regression with a 12% respectively 21% positive change. When including control variables in the conditional DiD-regression, several environmental valuations were of positive effect of which the different aspects of environmental behaviour are correlated with the chosen outcome variable and can help explain its variation. The housing company plans to institute more possibilities to waste sort in the future which will likely contribute to a higher conviction of tenants’ perception. Insights from this study can help guide future nudge implementation and its effect on tenant perception in neighbourhoods.