Conference Agenda

We study the environmental sustainability of individuals’ consumption choices using unique data from a FinTech App that tracks users’ spending and emissions at the transaction level. Using a randomized encouragement design, we show that individuals are likely to purchase carbon calculator services that provide them with detailed transaction-level information about their emissions. However, such a tool does not cause significant changes in their consumption and emissions. On the other hand, services that offset individuals’ emissions by planting trees are less likely to be adopted but prove effective in reducing users’ net emissions. Conditioning on age, gender, and income does not alter our findings. Our results show the challenges and opportunities associated with the automated tools promoting sustainable behavior that were initially confined to specialized FinTech Apps and are now becoming widespread across large financial institutions

Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular way to raise emergency funding after disasters. However, for victims of a major Colorado wildfire, we find that crowdfunding raised more support for wealthier beneficiaries rather than helping the most vulnerable. Specifically, beneficiaries with income above $150,000 receive 28% more support on GoFundMe than beneficiaries with income below $75,000. High-income households are also 14 percentage points more likely to have a crowdfunding campaign at all. These findings hold conditional on the amount of property value destroyed by the fire. The regressive allocation of disaster crowdfunding relates to several network advantages possessed by high-income households, including more connections outside the disaster area. Our findings highlight substantial disparities in social network insurance, which, as we show, likely exacerbate income inequalities in the recovery process.