Education Endowment Foundation

The climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges of our time. We know that urgent action is needed, yet we often delay it. This PhD thesis explores how information, expectations, and group dynamics shape our decisions about climate action.<br/>Using experiments and real-world data, the thesis studies three settings where individuals and groups face climate-related trade-offs. Chapter 2 finds that hopes for future technological breakthroughs can lead to inaction today, even when acting now would improve outcomes. Chapter 3 shows that when people can buy information about how their choices affect a shared goal, they coordinate more successfully. Chapter 4, using Dutch housing data, finds that energy labels influence prices, but less than expected—partly because buyers may already observe energy efficiency without the label.<br/>The findings show that simply providing information is not enough. What matters is how people interpret and use it—especially in groups, where coordination is key and incentives often clash. Behavioral tendencies like delay and fairness concerns also play a role.<br/>The common thread: information alone is not enough. What matters is how people use that information—especially in group settings, where coordination is difficult and interests may conflict. Effective climate policy must therefore go beyond informing people: it must account for human behavior and create the right conditions for collective action.

A growing literature studies exogenous shocks in election turnout to illuminate the relationship between turnout and election results. The normative and policy implications of these studies are unclear because an increase in turnout does not necessarily make the election result more representative of the electorate. We introduce a general method to calculate to what extent turnout shocks make election results more or less representative. We apply this to an interesting case, being the 2018 referendum in the Netherlands in which municipal mergers caused a shock in turnout. We find that, for the referendum result to be perfectly representative, only 71% of voters sensitive to the shock should have been exposed to it, instead of the actual 92%.

Four years ago, I came to Groningen to pursue my PhD in finance, especially focusing on asset pricing. It has been such a wonderful experience for me! Thanks to my daily supervisor, Lammertjan Dam, I engaged in many interesting topics. During the first year, he suggested me many courses related to asset pricing. These courses helped me have a systematic understanding of asset pricing and made me interested in this research area. So, I decided to change my PhD research plan to asset pricing at the end of the first year. I discussed this with Lammertjan and we wrote a completely new research proposal during the summer holiday after the first year. In hindsight, I can say it was the right decision and I am very happy with where I am now. Lammertjan is a super nice research partner and I enjoyed a lot working with him. We were stuck on a technical issue about taking logs with negative values for the first project for more than two years. In March 2022, he suddenly had some "crazy" ideas to solve the technical issue. We discussed a lot and working with him at that time was like a roller coaster. Finally, we ended up with nice math, estimations, and results and updated the project in the thesis. I saw his passion for research and I learned from him how to solve difficult issues step by step. That was an amazing March and I would never forget it. Now, I consider him an important friend. When I encountered frustration in research and in life, he was always there and gave me support and encouragement.

Critical thinking is just one skill crucial to evidence based practice in healthcare and education, write Jonathan Sharples and colleagues , who see exciting opportunities for cross sector collaboration