Despite the large and growing number of humanitarian emergencies, there is very little economic research on the impact of refugees and internally displaced people on the communities that receive them. This paper analyzes the impact of the refugee inflows from Burundi and Rwanda in 1993 and 1994...

Cost-effective allocation of conditional cash transfers (CCT) requires identifying recipients with low opportunity costs who might change behavior. This paper develops a low-cost approach for improving program implementation by using a stated preference, referendum-style survey question to...

Environmental conditional cash transfers, or "payments for ecosystem services" are a centerpiece of global efforts to protect biodiversity, safeguard watersheds, and mitigate climate change by reducing forest loss. This paper evaluates the impacts of Mexico's national payments for ecosystem...

This paper analyzes the household level forces driving the positive impact of inequality on common property forest cover in Mexico. A game theoretic model demonstrates that when common property goods are complementary to private inputs in production, an increase in wealth inequality can lead to...

Every year between 2000 and 2010, our planet lost native forests roughly the size of Costa Rica. (FAO, 2010). This rapid deforestation has dramatically changed the chemical composition of the world's atmosphere, the level of biodiversity, and the presence of vegetation key to maintaining...

Despite the large and growing number of humanitarian emergencies, there is little economic research on the impact of refugees and internally displaced people on the communities that receive them. This analysis of the impact of the refugee inflows from Burundi and Rwanda in 1993 and 1994 on host...

We study the consequences of poverty alleviation programs for environmental degradation in Mexico. We exploit the community-level eligibility discontinuity for a conditional cash transfer program to identify the impacts of income increases on deforestation, and use the program’s initial...

Every year from 2000 to 2010, our planet lost native forests roughly the size of Costa Rica (FAO 2010). This rapid deforestation has dramatically changed the chemical composition of the world’s atmosphere, the level of biodiversity, and the presence of vegetation key to maintaining watershed...

This paper develops and tests a theory of common property deforestation over space. The model examines both the spatial distribution of forest loss and the total amount of deforestation within a given community, showing how these outcomes are jointly determined. We estimate the equations of the...

Deforestation policies in Mexico need to recognize heterogeneity in communitys' management schemes. In communities that extract wood from the forest for profit, forestry projects generate funds whose investment in public goods increases the value of standing forest to those not receiving direct...