Reducing global poverty and addressing climate change and other environmental crises are among the most important challenges facing humanity today. This review article discusses one way in which these problems are intertwined: economic development affects the environment. I synthesize recent...

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...

This article discusses son preference in India, including both greater investment in sons and the fertility preference for sons. Regarding differential investment, I focus on child health and show that gender gaps in inputs and outcomes have narrowed in recent years. Nonetheless, girls remain...

This paper tests whether mothers and fathers differ in their spending on their daughters relative to their sons. We compare mothers' and fathers' willingness to pay (WTP) for specific goods for their children, diverging from the previous literature's approach of comparing the expenditure effects...

We propose and validate a simple way to augment the standard Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method that researchers use to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for a good. The augmentation is to measure WTP for another good ("benchmark good"), one unrelated to both the good the researcher is interested in...

We propose a new method to design a short survey measure of a complex concept such as women's agency. The approach combines mixed-methods data collection and machine learning. We select the best survey questions based on how strongly correlated they are with a "gold standard'' measure of the...

We conducted a randomized trial among 14,545 households in rural Burkina Faso to test the oft-cited hypothesis that limited access to contraception is an important driver of high fertility rates in West Africa. We do not find support for this hypothesis. Women who were given free access to...

Building on prior evidence that mothers often have a stronger preference for spending on children than fathers do, we use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impacts of a communication training program for mothers on child health in Uganda. The hypothesis is that the training will enable...

Particulate matter significantly reduces life expectancy in India. We use a randomized controlled trial in the Indian state of Punjab to evaluate the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (also known as payments for ecosystem services, or PES) in reducing crop residue burning, which is a...

Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are a global public good, which makes it efficient to act globally when addressing this challenge. We lay out several reasons that high-income countries seeking to mitigate climate change might have greater impact if they invest their resources in...