'Until not much more than 20 years ago, economists frequently lamented the fact that they were limited in their empirical analyses to statistical assessments of market behavior, because controlled economic experiments were (thought to be) infeasible, unethical, or both. Much has changed in the...

This paper presents a theoretical model to investigate the potential environmental consequences of weather index based insurance, a tool for mitigating weather risk that is gaining momentum in developing countries. We model potential effects of index insurance for pastoralists on animal stocking...

A framework is proposed to subsume public goods and common-pool resources, respectively, as specific cases of positive and negative externalities. A pure public good is a positive externality whose appropriable benefits are too small or too uncertain relative to the high private cost for anyone...