Electricity courses through our lives. Yet, there are still more than a billion people worldwide who are not connected to the grid, and many more get abysmal supply, unlike the 24/7/365 flow that rich countries take for granted. We argue that these shortfalls are due to a sad irony: treating...

This paper develops and implements a method to monetize the impact of moderate social distancing on deaths from COVID-19. Using the Ferguson et al. (2020) simulation model of COVID-19's spread and mortality impacts in the United States, we project that 3-4 months of moderate distancing beginning...

This paper develops the first globally comprehensive and empirically grounded estimates of mortality risk due to future temperature increases caused by climate change. Using 40 countries' subnational data, we estimate age-specific mortality-temperature relationships that enable both...

On March 24, 2020, the Prime Minister of India announced the world's largest COVID-19 lockdown. We summarize the initial impacts of the lockdown for a representative sample of mostly poor and non-migrant workers in Delhi. Using Facebook mobility data, we show that intra-city movement dropped 80...

The most prevalent and perhaps most popular climate policies in the U.S. are Renewable PortfolioStandards (RPS) that mandate that renewables (e.g., wind and solar) produce a specifiedshare of electricity, yet little is known about their efficiency. Using the most comprehensivedata set ever...

New technologies allow perfect detection of environmental violations at near-zero marginal cost, but take-up is low. We conducted a field experiment to evaluate enforcement of water conservation rules with smart meters in Fresno, CA. Households were randomly assigned combinations of enforcement...

We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals treatments when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regulator through social media...

We examine the introduction of automatic air pollution monitoring, which is a central feature of China’s “war on pollution.” Exploiting 654 regression discontinuity designs based on city-level variation in the day that monitoring was automated, we find that reported PM10 concentrations...

Delhi faces some of the world’s highest concentrations of PM2.5, the most damaging form of air pollution. Although awareness of outdoor air pollution is rising across the world, there is limited information on indoor air pollution (IAP) levels, particularly in heavily polluted cities like...

This paper outlines a two-step process to return the United States government’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) to the frontier of economics and climate science. The first step is to implement the original 2009-2010 Inter-agency Working Group (IWG) framework using a discount rate of 2%. This can...