How much of the economy is focused on protecting, rehabilitating, or managing the environment? To answer this question, we develop a proof-of-concept environmental activity account to quantify the environmental goods and services sector (EGSS) in the United States. Methodologically, we employ a...

This paper proposes that strong financial, judicial, and labor market institutions provide comparative advantage in clean industries, and thereby improve a country's environmental quality. Five complementary tests support this hypothesis. First, industries that depend on institutions are...

How responsive to health shocks are healthcare systems in the developing world? Developing countries are known to have both lower levels of hospital infrastructure and serious health shocks driven by air pollution. These shocks are transitory and may be marginal relative to other health demands,...

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...

Using micro-data from 48 developing countries, I document a recent reversal in the income-fertility relationship and its aggregate implications. Before 1960, children from larger families had richer parents and obtained more education. By century's end, both patterns had reversed. Consequently,...

This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought. We exploit natural variability in global temperature and rely on time-series variation. A 1°C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world GDP. Global...

A unilateral carbon tax trades off the distortionary costs of taxation and the future gains from slowing down global warming. Because the cost is local and immediate, whereas the benefit is global and delayed, this tradeoff tends to be unfavorable to unilateral carbon taxes. We show that this...

We examine the supply-side and demand-side determinants of global bilateral food aid shipments between 1971 and 2008. First, we find that domestic food production in developing countries is negatively correlated with subsequent food aid receipts, suggesting that food aid receipt is partly driven...