We examine the historical legacy of the Soviet Union on the current rate of human-induced soil erosion in its successor countries. We use a spatial regression discontinuity design and high-resolution soil erosion data. Our results suggest strong discontinuities in current soil erosion rates...

Agriculture is a main source of environmental degradation and biodiversity decline. We investigate the causal effects of culture on pro-environmental behaviors of the agricultural population (farmers), and how policy instruments interact with culture to influence individual behavior. We exploit...

We estimate annual discontinuities in remotely-sensed crop yields at all international land borders and link them to changes in the economic freedom index by the Fraser Institute, a country-level measure of institutional quality. Each point of the ten-point index increases the discontinuity by...

Time-varying parameter (TVP) models are very flexible in capturing gradual changes in the effect of explanatory variables on the outcome variable. However, in particular when the number of explanatory variables is large, there is a known risk of overfitting and poor predictive performance, since...

Time-varying parameter (TVP) models are very flexible in capturing gradual changes in the effect of explanatory variables on the outcome variable. However, in particular when the number of explanatory variables is large, there is a known risk of overfitting and poor predictive performance, since...