We introduce a new methodology to detect and measure economic activity using geospatial data and apply it to steel production, a major industrial pollution source worldwide. Combining plant output data with geospatial data, such as ambient air pollutants, nighttime lights, and temperature, we...

Protecting species' habitats is the main policy tool employed across the globe to reduce biodiversity losses. These protections are hypothesized to conflict with private landowners' interests. We study the economic consequences of the most extensive and controversial piece of such environmental...

US crops face higher losses as growing season temperatures rise and destructive disasters become commonplace. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) easement programs offer an adaptation strategy to improve agricultural resilience. Easements impact agricultural production directly by...

The pace of biodiversity loss requires drastic shifts in conservation efforts that carry substantial costs. We investigate how the financial market prices such conservation costs exploiting the "Green Shield Action," a major regulatory initiative launched by the Chinese central government in...

The governance and transaction cost insights of Oliver Williamson (1975, 1985, 1996, 2010) and Ronald Coase (1937, 1992) have framed antitrust polices and firm management strategies. Transaction cost economics explain efficient governance adaptation. With a focus on private efficiency gains...

Coal heating in residential homes is an important source of indoor air pollution, leading to detrimental health effects. We conduct a randomized field experiment in northern China using three types of SMS campaigns targeting three potential biases that may hinder the adoption of electric...

We survey various ethical issues related to the use of pollution pricing. While pollution pricing, for example in the form of Pigouvian taxes or cap-and-trade systems, is widely used in environmental economics modeling, many moral and ethical assumptions lie behind those models, and many ethical...

Many US states have set ambitious renewable portfolio standards (RPS) that require utilities to switch from fossil fuels toward renewables. RPS increases the renewables capacity, bond issuance, maturity, and yield spreads of investor-owned utilities compared to municipal producers that are...

Formal rules within organizations are pervasive, but may be interpreted and implemented differently by actors within the organization, impacting organizational outcomes. We consider a delegation reform that changed formal rules within the environmental regulator in an Indian state, by giving...

Economic policies often involve dynamic interventions, where individuals receive repeated interventions over multiple periods. This dynamics makes past responses informative to predict future responses and ultimate outcomes depend on the history of interventions. Despite these phenomena,...