Columbus's arrival in the New World triggered an unprecedented movement of people and crops across the Atlantic Ocean. We study an overlooked part of this Columbian Exchange: the effects of New World crops in Africa. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that the introduction of maize increased...

Pilot and demonstration (P&D) projects are commonly deployed to catalyze early adoption of technology, but are poorly understood in terms of mechanism and impact. We conceptually distinguish unique functions of pilots and demonstrations, then examine whether they accelerate green building...

This paper introduces geoengineering into an optimal control model of climate change economics. Together with mitigation and adaptation, carbon and solar geoengineering span the universe of possible climate policies. Their wildly different characteristics have important implications for climate...

Engineering the climate via Solar Radiation Management (SRM) is increasingly considered as a component of future climate policies. We study the strategic incentives for countries to choose the level of SRM at different times in the future, accounting for the regionally uneven effect of SRM on...

Industrial activity periodically experiences breakthrough innovations in energy efficiency, but the estimated impacts of these innovations on aggregate energy use are highly varied. We develop a general equilibrium model to investigate whether this variation is determined by the structure of the...

This research presents the first evidence that moderate fecundity had maximized long-run reproductive success in the human population. Using a reconstructed genealogy for nearly half a million individuals in Quebec during the 1608-1800 period, we find that while a high fecundity was associated...