In developing countries, urban clusters of manufacturers which are "informal"—small-scale, unlicensed and virtually unregulated—can have severe environmental impacts. Yet pollution control efforts have traditionally focused on large industrial sources, in part because the problem is not...

Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, is home to the U.S.–Mexico border’s largest maquiladora labor force, and also its worst air pollution. We marshal two types of evidence to examine the link between maquiladoras and air pollution in Ciudad Juárez, and in its sister city, El Paso, Texas. First, we...

Shade-grown coffee provides a livelihood to many farmers, protects biodiversity, and creates environmental services. Many shade-coffee farmers have abandoned production in recent years, however, in response to declines in international coffee prices. This paper builds a farmer decision model...

Protected areas are a cornerstone of forest conservation in developing countries. Yet we know little about their effects on forest cover change or the socioeconomic status of local communities, and even less about the relationship between these effects. This paper assesses whether 'win-win'...

Increasingly popular tailored regulation (TR) initiatives like EPA's Project XL allow plants to voluntarily substitute site-specific environmental performance standards for command-and-control regulations that dictate pollution abatement strategies. TR can significantly reduce participants'...