We explore the causal effect of market-oriented pension reform on net foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in Latin America, which has experienced a wave of pension privatization and FDI in the last two decades. With our balanced panel of 17 countries over the 1991-2006 period, we implement...

Based on Akerlof and Kranton (2005), who argue that group identity and social norms influence individual preferences towards work effort, a model is developed to understand why firms create good job conditions, taking into account the cost of implementing them and their impact on wages and...

This research develops economic framed field experiments in order to analyze the attitude and behavior of farm groundwater users in several fictional situations, including adoption of efficient irrigation technology and compliance of group arrangements. A groundwater game was played by 256...

Rising oil prices has led to increased interest to replace domestic demand for liquid fuels for transport (petrol and diesel) with biofuel production (ethanol and biodiesel). One of the pioneers in biofuel production is Brazil, which since the 1970s has established a government program that...

We examine the extent to which economic development reduces both a country's disaster risk and its social vulnerability to climate-related disasters. Global climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and various types...

A cereal yield response function is estimated conditional upon environmental and topographical features to detect the effects of spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependence in explaining agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for direct and localized spillover effects,...

2010 AAEA Presidential Address; forthcoming in January 2011 AJAE in shortened version.

This paper systematically estimates the potential benefit of introducing improved irrigation schemes in Mt. Kilimanjaro to help rain dependent farmers cope with the risks of climate change. The study uses Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) to elicit farmers’ Willingness to Pay (WTP) for...

This paper examines and predicts the effects of climate change and climate extremes on China’s land use conversion and soil carbon sequestration under two alternative climate change scenarios. It intends to investigate the following three questions. 1) How did climate factors affect land-use...