Conservation programs in low-income countries often have dual goals of protecting the environment and reducing poverty. This article discusses the tension between these two goals in payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs. Participants who undertake a pro-environment behavior receive a...

The history of foreign development assistance is one of movement away from addressing immediate needs and toward focusing on the underlying causes of poverty. A recent manifestation is the move towards sustainability,' which stresses community mobilization, education, and cost-recovery. This...

We provide the planner's solution to a model where households learn from exogenous natural disaster arrivals about arrival rates and spend to mitigate future damages. Mitigation cannot be decentralized due to positive externalities from curtailing aggregate risks. First-best can be implemented...

This paper evaluates a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program in western Uganda that offered forest-owning households cash payments if they conserved their forest. The program was implemented as a randomized trial in 121 villages, 60 of which received the program for two years. The PES...

The world has pledged to protect 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030 to halt the rapid deterioration of critical ecosystems. We summarize the state of knowledge about the impacts of protected area policies, with a focus on deforestation and vegetation cover. We discuss critical issues...

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are a widely used approach for forest conservation through which people are paid to avoid deforesting land they enroll in the program. We present findings from a randomized trial in Mexico that tested whether a PES contract that requires enrollees to enroll...

Critics of foreign aid programs argue that these funds often support corrupt governments and inefficient bureaucracies. Supporters argue that foreign aid can be used to reward good governments. This paper documents that there is no evidence that less corrupt governments receive more foreign aid....

We evaluate the long-run effects of a decentralized approach to economic development, called community driven development (CDD), a prominent strategy for delivering foreign aid. Notably we revisit a randomized CDD program in Sierra Leone 11 years after launch. We estimate large persistent gains...

This paper explores the roles of different levels of government in assisting the poor. Using a model with utility interdependence, the paper presents some theoretical results on how levels of poor relief vary with the extent of mobility of the poor under both centralized and decentralized...