We use a data-driven methodology to quantify the importance of different skills in performing green tasks, aiming to estimate the green potential of occupations in Switzerland. By this we mean the potential of an occupation to be able to perform green tasks on the basis of the skills attributed to it, whereby it is irrelevant whether the occupation already bundles green tasks or not. The results show that occupations with a high green potential are predominantly those with an engineering and technical background. In order to substantiate our green potential measure, we provide evidence of a positive association between demand of employment in occupations with high green potential and an increase in the implicit tax rate on greenhouse gas emissions. The share of employment in occupations with a green potential above a reasonable threshold in the total Swiss labour force is 16.7% (number of persons employed) and 18.8% (full-time equivalents). These employed persons are, on average, younger, more often men, have a higher level of educational attainment and a higher probability of having immigrated than employed persons in occupations with low green potential.

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We estimate the demand value of road safety improvements in Switzerland from survey data using a novel elicitation approach. Individuals' responses to questions about how much public spending on road safety should be increased are combined with observations of income, tax rate, and road usage to estimate the economic value of a statistical accident avoided. Information obtained from a risk-risk tradeo elicitation allows us to distinguish willingness-to-pay values for various degrees of accident severity. Our most comprehensive estimate of the value of a statistical accident avoided amounts to CHF 11.0 million ($11.6 million); the corresponding value per statistical life is close to CHF 4.2 million ($4.5 million). We explore the sensitivity of these estimates to anchoring and other framing e ects and find that the popularity of specific road safety programs is influenced by both the availability of di erent choice options and the provision of partisan cues expressing political endorsement or opposition.

Agriculture contributes substantially to global greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. Current agricultural policies tolerate these impacts and sometimes even aggravate them through subsidies for unsustainable production systems and products. Against this background, we explore the resulting transfers to agriculture and food associated with different dietary styles. Using data from Switzerland, we consider both direct transfers through government subsidies and indirect transfers through toleration of environmental impacts and costs. Gross transfers were quantified based on existing studies that (i) define eight dietary styles in terms of the quantity of the different product groups, (ii) allocate subsidies for agriculture to product groups, (iii) allocate environmental impacts to product groups using life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, and (iv) estimate external costs of agriculture using politically endorsed expenditures for damage avoidance. To quantify net transfers associated with the dietary styles, we subtracted individual tax contributions from the subsidies received and average external costs individually suffered from external costs caused. We found that the gross transfers from government to agriculture range from about CHF 500 to about CHF 2000 annually per taxpayer/consumer depending on dietary styles. Net transfers per taxpayer/consumer range from about CHF −1000 to about CHF 1000 depending on dietary style and income. The estimates highlight that current policies strongly privilege and thereby also endorse environmentally problematic dietary styles over more environmentally friendly ones, contradicting official strategies and targets in the domains of environment and public health.

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