We explore the economic effects of biodiversity loss by developing an ecologically-founded model that captures how different species interact to deliver the ecosystem services that complement other factors of economic production. Aggregate ecosystem services are produced by combining several...

Human beings' domination of the planet has not been kind to many species worldwide. This is to be expected. Humans have radically altered natural landscapes, harvested heavily from the ocean, and altered the climate in an unprecedented way. Recent concerns over the extent and rate of...

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...

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 Amazon rainforests have been undergoing unprecedented levels of human-induced disturbances. In addition to local impacts, such changes are likely to cascade following the eastern-western atmospheric flow generated by trade winds. We propose a model of spatial and temporal interactions...

An economic approach to calculating the Social Value of Temporary Reductions (SVTR) in atmospheric carbon is discussed. The SVTR allows different carbon removals projects to be prioritised in a way that maximises welfare and establishes equivalence between temporary, risky removals with...

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...

International environment and development agencies increasingly emphasize external cofinancing when selecting projects to fund. This paper considers whether the emphasis on cofinancing helps promote institutional objectives, or creates perverse and inefficient incentives. We present a model of...

Land market incompleteness is argued to have pervasive effects in Sub-Saharan Africa, including on agricultural efficiency, equity, and structural transformation. Yet experimental evidence on land market participation is virtually non-existent. We randomly allocate subsidies for agricultural...

Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can...