5th Research Forum session of the academic year 2025-2026

Date: Thursday, March 12th, 2026

Time:  2:30pm - 4pm

Room: 40.035 (Calsamiglia) Roger de Llúria, Campus: Ciutadella

Speaker: Katrin Auspurg, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Chair: Jorge Rodríguez Menés, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Presentation - "Tax the Rich, Compensate the Poor? Perceived Fairness, Effectiveness,
and Public Support for CO₂ Pricing"

Abstract

Public acceptance is a key challenge for effective carbon pricing. While economists emphasize efficiency, citizens often perceive such policies as unfair, especially because of their regressive effects on lower-income households. This talk presents first findings from the newly launched German Longitudinal Environmental Study (GLEN)—a large-scale panel survey designed to examine environmental attitudes, behaviors, and policy acceptance in Germany.
Drawing on a multifactorial survey experiment embedded in a short supplementary GLEN wave in 2025 (N ≈ 6,000), we analyze how redistributive design features—such as income-dependent tax rates and compensation schemes—affect support for carbon pricing. Respondents evaluated various policy scenarios applied to example households
differing in income and behavioral opportunities to adapt to higher prices.

Our results show that fairness perceptions exert a stronger influence on policy support than perceived effectiveness. Citizens are particularly concerned about unequal burdens of carbon pricing, though progressive pricing, compensation mechanisms, and feasible behavioral alternatives can partly mitigate these concerns. The findings highlight the fairness–effectiveness trade-off in climate policy design and the conditions under which carbon pricing is more likely to gain public legitimacy.

About the Speaker

Katrin Auspurg is Professor of Sociology with a focus on quantitative methods of empirical social research at LMU Munich. Her research interests include survey and experimental methods, social and economic inequalities in labor markets and families, environmental social science, attitudes toward immigration, and the causes and consequences of discrimination. She is also dedicated to advancing the replicability of social science research. In the field of environmental and climate research, she is one of the Principal Investigators of the German Longitudinal Environmental Study (GLEN), a large-scale panel survey launched in 2024 that regularly examines environmental attitudes, behaviors, and policy acceptance in Germany.

Link session: meet.google.com/hgy-gcmr-win