In this paper we argue that the burgeoning empirical debate over scope sensitivity within contingent valuation studies is fundamentally incomplete in that the effect of study design upon observed scope has largely been ignored. In particular we highlight the frequently overlooked fact that in...

Environmental decisions made by individuals, civil society and the state involve questions of economic efficiency, environmental effectiveness, equity and political legitimacy. These four criteria are constitutive of economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, which...

This paper reviews literature in and around new institutional economics to assess its contributions to, and limitations in, research on environmental decision-making and governance. The paper also proposes ways to increase the fruitfulness of new institutional approach for environmental...

This paper critically reviews the literature on environmental valuation of ecosystem services across the range of global biomes. The main objective of this review is to assess the policy relevance of the information encompassed by the wide range of valuation studies that have been undertaken so...

Charitable giving has increasingly become ‘tough love’ - it has come to require recipients to undertake costly prior action. A common justification is that of greater efficiency: willingness to undertake costly actions signals greater productivity from transfers. However, there is a...

Is the World Bank’s Development Policy Lending likely to enhance ownership and have greater effectiveness than structural adjustment? We specify a dynamic common agency model in which a government committed to reform faces domestic opposition from interest groups. The dynamic specification,...

Lenders condition future loans on some index of past performance. Typically, banks condition future loans on repayments of earlier obligations while international organizations condition future loans on the implementation of some policy conditions. We build an agency model that accounts for...

This paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed her income, the agent...

Traditionally volatility is viewed as a measure of variability, or risk, of an underlying asset. However recently investors began to look at volatility from a different angle. It happened due to emergence of a market for new derivative instruments - variance swaps. In this paper first we...