Climate change mitigation in aging societies: Evidence from a laboratory experiment

For those countries with aging populations, overlapping generations models postulate the presence a demographic penalty in climate policy: Under standard assumptions, the time structure of costs and bene\u85ts from providing the global public good of climate change mitigation mili-tate against contributions by older individuals. Here we test experimen-tally whether the behavioral assumptions underpinning this demographic penalty are present in a realistic set up: Our subjects from the general public are o¤ered an opportunity to contribute to the real-world pub-lic good of CO2 mitigation via the EU ETS. Contrary to standard as-sumptions, we \u85nd evidence for a positive and strong inuence of age on subjectscontributions. On average more mature subjects contribute signi cantly more (2.02e) than young subjects for climate change miti-gation. In addition, 21.9 % of mature subjects even contribute their full endowment of 10e towards the o¤ered public good. This e¤ect is indepen-dent from other observable demographic factors. As an extension of the existing experimental literature on this topic, we can link this age e¤ect to some extent to the beliefs of our subjects