Sense Partners’ Rosie Collins was awarded the inaugural Dr Ed Hearnshaw Prize for Economics and the Environment for her essay, FlexiWork.
This is a new prize for young economists writing on environmental economics, co-sponsored by the Hearnshaw family. She presented the winning paper at the February GEN2021 conference in front of Ed’s peers and family.
The question set for the essay was: Nudging us: How can government policy interventions encourage Kiwi consumers to make choices that result in lower greenhouse gas emissions?
On Rosie’s essay, the judges noted: “Rosie articulated her ideas to the conference in a clear and compelling presentation. Her proposal is elegant in its simplicity: flipping the default in employment law towards flexible working, to reduce demand for transport. Rosie delved into the legislative framework, leading to a proposal to reframe the default to working two days a week from home. She calculated the resulting emissions reductions, acknowledged the potential distributional impacts and considered implementation.”
Rosie with Alice, John and Vickie Hearnshaw.
Key points are:
There is a striking opportunity to reduce New Zealand households’ carbon emissions by about 2% per year, or 192 CO2kt if more people worked from home more often.
While 4 in 10 New Zealand jobs could be done remotely without a loss of productivity, only 10% actually work from home.
Behavioural barriers – fear of stigma, ruffling feathers and status quo bias – stand in the way of employees requesting to remote work and employers approving such requests.
‘FlexiWork’ is a nudge proposal to tackle this problem. It shifts onto employers the responsibility of formally justifying when work cannot be achieved remotely.
This nudge would not mandate remote work, but slows down the process of defaulting to office-based arrangements. It changes power dynamics in workers’ favour.
It could save about 96 million car trips each year, assuming a quarter of those who ordinarily travel by car switch to remote work at least two days a week.