Turning the Paris Agreement's greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments. We address the question of the acceptability of cost-effective climate policy in a real-voting setting. First, we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes, rejected in Switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people. Energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value-added tax. We examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes, along with the perception of ineffectiveness. Most people would have preferred tax revenues to be allocated for environmental purposes. Second, at the same time of the ballot, we tested the acceptability of alternative designs of a carbon tax with a choice experiment survey on a representative sample of the Swiss population. Survey respondents are informed about environmental, distributional and competitiveness effects of each carbon tax design. These impacts are estimated with a computable general equilibrium model. This original setting generates a series of novel results. Providing information on the expected environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes reduces the demand for environmental earmarking. Making distributional effects salient generates an important demand for progressive designs, e.g. social cushioning or recycling via lump-sum transfers. The case of lump-sum recycling is particularly striking: it is sufficient to show its desirable distributional properties to make it one of the most preferred designs, which corresponds to a completely novel result in the literature. We show that providing detailed information on the functioning of environmental taxes may contribute to close both the gap between acceptability ex ante and ex post and the gap between economists' prescriptions and the preferences of the general public.

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Violence in the Rakhine State of Myanmar has led to a humanitarian crisis as Rohingya people flee across the border to Bangladesh (1). With the rapid influx of nearly 700,000 arrivals between August 2017 and the beginning of 2018, the Bangladeshi city of Cox's Bazar is now under severe strain from a Rohingya population of almost 1 million, one of the largest concentrations of refugees in the world (2). The crisis seized global attention, and the international response was rapidly escalated to a Level 3 emergency (3). In addition to the humanitarian challenges, the mass influx of Rohingya refugees has resulted in environmental degradation both within the refugee camps and in the surrounding areas (2). The expansion of existing campsites has led to more than 2000 ha of forest loss in the Cox's Bazar region (4). Expansion of the old Kutupalong camp blocked the only corridor used by the globally endangered Asian elephant as a migration route and trapped about 45 elephants in the western side of the camp (5). The latest Rohingya settlement has also amplified humanelephant conflict in the area, with 13 human casualties so far (6). The remaining elephant habitat is under severe pressure from uncontrolled fuelwood collection in the forest (7). The pressure on forests has caused tensions with local

Su m m ary. This p aper prop oses a m ethod for identifyin g hou sin g afford ability p rob lem s. The housing m ark et being im perfect, high ren t-to-in com e ratios m ight be the resu lt not only of a taste for spaciou s housing but also of rent prem ia. Conversely, som e househ old s curren tly in ad van tageou s housing m ay face dif® culty w hen they m ove. A b etter indicator of afford ability com pares incom e to the average ren t the m ark et charges for h ousing deem ed approp riate for a household, and a secon d ind icator com pares cu rren t h ousing con sum ption w ith approp riate con sum ption . W e ® nd th at m ore than tw o households out of th ree that have high rent burdens cou ld afford approp riate housing. Alm ost one h ousehold in two th at can n ot afford approp riate housing m anages to keep its rent burden low . This paper m akes a point for co-ord in atin g tenan t-based assistan ce w ith other instru m ents of housing aid.