Index of environmental awareness through the MIMIC approach.

This paper addresses the issue of environmental awareness in the regions of the Russian Federation. For this purpose, an index of environmental awareness at regional level is derived as a latent variable from various categories of search entries in Yandex, the prominent Russian search engine, during two periods in the years 2014 and 2015. The frequency of these search requests presumably depends on certain economic and socio‐economic causes, which are integrated into the model for further investigation. The relation between regional wealth and environmental awareness is thereby of particular interest. The multiple indicators‐multiple (MIMIC) causes model allows us to estimate an index of environmental awareness and to rank the Russian regions according to this index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]