Urban sustainability policy provides opportunities for expanding global efforts for climate change mitigation. Yet local governments may not commit to make such policy efforts. It is well recognized that internal and external factors in state and local governments can be potential drivers. Less recognized is that green energy policy adoption can also be impacted by competitive federalism, under which state laws might influence the likelihood of local adoption. Drawing on prior studies on inter-governmental interactions and managerial turnover, we hypothesize the effect of intergovernmental influence, managerial turnover, and their interactions on city adoption of energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Results of the multilevel regression model indicate that state influence via regulatory or financial tools can encourage city sustainable energy consumption and production, while managerial turnover can inhibit these conditions, but the negative impacts of managerial turnover can be reversed when the successors are recruited externally. Our tests support the existence of both local government free-riding and city mobilization to enact more green policies with externally hired city managers, thereby helping us to distinguish the impact of competitive federalism in local energy policy.

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In this paper we consider a class of infinitedimensional linear programming problems, called continuoustime linear programming problems (CLP ). In our previous paper [16], we presented a discrete approximation method for solving (CLP ) and established the estimation for error bounds of searched numerical solutions. However, the computation times involved can be very large as a result of solving a very large finite-dimensional linear program. We will focus on a special class of (CLP ) and provide improved methods to overcome the computational bottleneck.

Replacing fossil fuel with solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is critical to the transition to renewable energy and thus a key feature of the contentious and often confusing policy debates surrounding climate change. Governments can frame such environmental issues in various ways, but consensus is lacking on whether economic or environmental benefits most effectively encourage pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, such as supporting PV technology. In this study, we introduce a moderator—psychological distance between citizens and policy outcomes—to elaborate this relation. Based on the federalism literature, we suggest that different levels of government, as the policy implementers, represent a sense of distance. The construal level theory (CLT) is adopted, and we hypothesize that the congruency between psychological distance and the construal level of policy outcomes will increase policy support and willingness to pay for solar PV installation. The results of survey experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offer partial support for our theoretical expectations and add new insights. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.