Circular economy (CE) is a sustainable development strategy that is being proposed to tackle urgent problems of environmental degradation and resource scarcity. CE's 3R principles are to reduce, reuse and recycle materials. The principles account for a circular system where all materials are...

This paper studies how in utero exposure to a large-scale climate adaptation program affects birth outcomes. The program built around one million cisterns in Brazil's poorest and driest region to promote small-scale decentralized rainfall harvesting. Access to cisterns during early pregnancy...

Production of commodities based on open-access renewable natural resources (NR) has usually been examined under "low" congestion (LC) - where MC AC and both increase with output. I identify two additional congestion categories, "high" (HC) and "super" (SC) congestion - where AC is...

Numerous developing economies depend vitally on renewable natural-resource (NR)-based commodities. This study develops a general equilibrium model to examine the steady-state impact of changes in a small economy's NR congestion under open access and optimal regulation. This issue has often been...

We uncover a hidden illegal fishing practice: the use of fishing nets with illegally small mesh size. The small mesh prevents nearly all fish of saleable size from escaping the net, but also traps a large number of fish which are too small to be sold on the market and are therefore discarded at...

Every year between 2000 and 2010, our planet lost native forests roughly the size of Costa Rica. (FAO, 2010). This rapid deforestation has dramatically changed the chemical composition of the world's atmosphere, the level of biodiversity, and the presence of vegetation key to maintaining...

Enclosures enforced private property rights at the onset of industrialization, yet numerous estimations of the enclosures' effects on production and productivity rely on non-experimental designs. We estimate the causal effects of enclosure reforms applying state- of-the-art...

In an open economy with common property resources at the community level, marriage and migratory decisions crucially depend on inheritance rules on the commons. Motivated by the traditional management of the commons in the Italian Alps, we present a model that fits the evolution of property...

This paper documents the effect of primary forest cover loss on increased incidence of malaria. The evidence is consistent with an ecological response. I show that land use change, anti-malarial programs or migration cannot explain the effect of primary forest cover loss on increased malarial...

We use the adaptive cycle theory to improve our understanding of cycles of urban change in the city of Barcelona from 1953 to present. Most specifically, we explore the vulnerabilities and windows of opportunity these cycles for change introduced in the release (Ω) and reorganization (α)...