Event Details

Speaker:  Ashwini Sankar, post-doctoral researcher at the Carlson School of Management, University of MN

As human consumption increases, environmental degradation also steadily rises. Recycling is one way to stem this rise in degradation. The Economics literature has told us that social norms could be used as a tool to provide for public goods. Ashwini uses a theoretical model to build the framework for recycling behavior at the household level. Here, she shows that as social norms of recycling increase, recycling rate increases and waste per capita declines. Using data from Minnesota spanning 18 years, she will show in an instrumental regression framework that as social capital index increases, waste per capita does indeed decline significantly. However, we don't see any evidence of an increase in recycling rate with an increase in social capital.

Ashwini Sankar is a post-doctoral researcher at the Carlson School of Management, working in the areas of health and environmental policy. Previously, she graduated with a PhD in applied economics from the department of applied Economics at the University of Minnesota in 2019. Prior to doing her PhD, she has a decade of experience in the analytics space in the pharmaceutical and consumer goods industries.

Refreshments provided.

This EnviroThursday is co-sponsored by the Environmental Studies and Economics Departments.