Teevrat Garg is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. He is an affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
Jacob Hochard is an Assistant Professor of Economics at East Carolina University. He is a research fellow at the Center for Natural Hazards Research and an affiliate of the North Carolina Agromedicine Institute.
Meera Mahadewan is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She will join as an Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2021 at the University of California, Irvine.
The Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) hosted its annual summer meetings from May 30-31, 2019 at Lake Tahoe. We were pleased to see many sessions, and papers in other topical sessions, focused on developing countries. The highlight was a fantastic keynote by Seema Jayachandran, Professor of Economics at Northwestern University titled, “Why I’m Excited About the Intersection of Environmental & Development Economics.” She focused on how the increased availability of both satellite and administrative data has opened new frontiers. Below, we highlight a non-representative set of papers related to the environment-development nexus that were presented at AERE. Our apologies to those authors’ whose papers we missed; however, our inability to cover all papers hopefully represents the growth in this space.
Deforestation
Baylis, Ordonez and Ramirez show community forest management (CFM) reduced forest loss by 3% for communities in Michoacan, Mexico between 2001-12, using foresters’ spatial distribution as an instrument for CFM adoption.
Bocci and Sohngen use 2012 and 2017 household survey data in Guatemala‘s Maya Biosphere Reserve to show that forest concessions increased local incomes and decreased deforestation activity by 4% (see the full paper here).
Bragança and Dahis use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to estimate the effect of competitive elections on deforestation in Brazil. The effects seem to be driven by politicians with reelection incentives.
Eisenbarth et al. use RCT on increasing community monitoring – randomizing the training of monitors as part of treatment – and impressive data on forest stocks to investigate forest management in Uganda. They find that treatment communities cut less trees close to the forest edge.
Garg and Shenoy examine the impact of a place-based economic policy in India on deforestation using a spatial RDD. They find large economic gains, but minimal effects on forest cover.
Gibbs, Moyette, and Skidmore show that anti-deforestation policies led to productivity gains in cattle production in Brazil from 2004 to 2016 (see the full paper here).
Jackie Willwerth integrates land use models in Uganda with a computable general equilibrium model (CGE) to link investments in natural resources and infrastructure with growth scenarios. She estimates that high investment in water infrastructure can boost GDP/pp up to 9% (!).
Szerman et al. use variation in timing of land titling in Brazil to show that titling – as distinct from having applied for a title, reduces deforestation by 2% (- a cool feature of the quasi-experimental design is that timing of application for titling explains only 24% of the timing of receiving a land title.)
Electricity and Energy
Beattie et al. find (using an RCT) that information treatments detailing the cost-savings and benefits of energy-conserving LED bulbs increase take-up of LED bulbs in China, and reduce the energy-efficiency gap.
Burlig et al. find, using simulation studies, that inefficiencies in the Indian supply of electricity can be mitigated by moving towards more short-term wholesale contracts and incentivizing power plants to optimally time their outages.
Fetter and Usmani find with an RDD that, in India, electrification is more effective in regions with electricity-intensive industries, providing insight into the debate on the benefits of rural electrification programs.
Mahadevan also uses RDD to show that the state provision of services is vulnerable to political pressures; Indian politicians reward their constituents with cheaper electricity, leading to large welfare losses in the electricity sector.
Meeks deploys an RCT in Kyrgyzstan to test if smart meters can disrupt the infrastructure-quality trap.
Lang finds that incentives for solar payments had little impact on solar purchases in Rwanda and Kenya, due to uncertainty about the future marginal utility of solar products, and inter-temporal substitution.
Schutze (and co-authors), using data from Brazil, find that reallocating within-firm resources to maximize energy efficiency does not work because of an industry-wide shift towards less energy-efficient firms, leading to lower energy-efficiency overall.
Steinbucks (and co-authors) investigate the willingness to pay for electricity in in Burkina Faso, Rwanda, and Senegal; a low WTP for both grid-based or off-grid electricity and suggest solar lamps as a more cost-justifiable measure.
Fossil Fuels
Cropper et al. use Global Burden of Disease results to estimate health burden for every single plant in India. In a related study, Madhok et al. show that coal plants in India increase in-patient deaths.
Cust et al. show that the impact of oil and gas windfalls on firms in Indonesia leads to increased productivity in the manufacturing sector through exit of low-productivity firms.
Usmani (and co-authors) implemented in an RCT with energy technologies and find, surprisingly, that providing more choices to consumers in Senegal, in the context of energy-efficient technology take-up, reduced adoption of clean technology.
Pollution and Weather
Blom et al. use DHS data from 15 countries to show negative effects of heat on nutrition.
Cohen and Gonzalez consider various channels that explain the temperature-crime relationship in Mexico.
Rob Eilliott documents that typhoons in China are responsible for $3.2 billion annually in lost manufacturing sales; and the reduction in sales is primarily from domestic buyers.
Garg, McCord, and Montfort show that social policy in the form of cash transfers can play an important role in adaptation to high temperatures in Mexico.
Ghanem and Zhang (forthcoming in JEEM) show that nearly 50% of cities in China reported dubious particulate matter (PM10) data.
Stopnitzky and Tambet combine survey and climate data to show Peruvian farmers increase water conservation practices and fertilizer use following rainfall shocks. Responses in soil conservation practices require multiple shocks (see the full paper here).
Traore and Foltz reveal that higher temperatures in Côte d’Ivoire decrease firm revenue and productivity leading to decreased competitiveness as evident by firms exiting domestic and foreign markets.
Victoria Wenxin Xie shows that extreme heat in Brazil leads to layoffs of manufacturing workers. Many workers fail to find jobs within 3 years, leading to a persistent negative employment effect (see the full paper here).
