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...

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...

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...

Jurisdictions adopt heterogeneous climate policies that vary both in terms of ambition and in terms of policy approach, with some jurisdictions pricing carbon and others subsidizing clean production. We distinguish two types of policy spillovers associated with diverse policy approaches to...

Climate change increases weather variability, exacerbating agricultural risk in poor countries. Risk-averse farmers are unable to tailor their planting decisions to the coming season, and underinvest in profitable inputs. Accurate, long-range forecasts enable farmers to optimize for the season...

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...

We study a fundamental institution in many societies: the structure of property rights over land. Across societies, communal land rights have been more common than private land rights. We test the hypothesis that longer fallow requirements - the time needed to leave land uncultivated to restore...

We link census records for millions of farm children to identify owner-operators of the family farm in adulthood, providing the first population-level evidence on intergenerational farm transfers. Using our panel of U.S. census data from 1900 to 1940, our analysis supports the primogeniture...