The growth and impacts of plastic pollution have emerged as a major environmental challenge globally. Plastic pollution has a wide range of impacts on public health, ecosystems, biodiversity, and economies and can occur during each stage of the plastic lifecycle, from extraction of raw...

The Sustainable Development Network (SDN) calls for elevating the environment into upstream processes such as policy, programmatic, and investment dialogue. In its 2002 environment strategy, the Bank committed to use strategic environmental assessments (SEAs), an environmental planning tool for...

Marine plastic pollution is threatening the potential of the blue economy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Recognizing the urgent need to address this problem, the governments of Morocco and Tunisia decided to partner with the World Bank to address marine plastic pollution by...

In 2010, the Gulf Coast experienced the largest oil spill, the greatest mobilization of spill response resources, and the first Gulf-wide deepwater drilling moratorium in U.S. history. Taking advantage of the unexpected nature of the spill and drilling moratorium, I estimate the net effects of...

This paper explores how advertising impacts the consumer response to news about unobserved product quality. Specifically, we estimate how British Petroleum's (BP) 2000-2008 "Beyond Petroleum" advertising campaign affected the impact of the 2010 BP oil spill. We find that BP station margins...

Recent efforts to endogenize technological change in climate policy models demonstrate the importance of accounting for the opportunity cost of climate R&D investments. Because the social returns to R&D investments are typically higher than the social returns to other types of investment, any...

We explore the economic effects of biodiversity loss by developing an ecologically-founded model that captures how different species interact to deliver the ecosystem services that complement other factors of economic production. Aggregate ecosystem services are produced by combining several...

"Global climate change is occurring at an accelerating pace, and the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are forcing climate change continue to increase. Given the present pace of international actions, it seems unlikely that atmospheric composition can be stabilized at a level that will...

This chapter applies recent research on environmental enforcement to a potential U.S. program to control greenhouse gases, especially through emission trading. Climate policies present the novel problem of integrating emissions reductions that are relatively easy to monitor (such as carbon...