Improving access to more modern forms of energy requires supply chains that reach further into rural areas. This paper studies a supply-side intervention intended to foster last-mile distribution of energy-access technologies through local small-scale entrepreneurship. We use a staggered-implementation evaluation design to assess the impact on employment and income outcomes of the intervention, which

This paper examines the effect of biomass burning on adolescent health in India. The biomass burning problem is quite acute especially in North India, with some states experiencing forest fires and few states actively engaging in crop burning practice. We combine remote sensing data on biomass burning events with a pan-India survey on teenage girls (TAG survey). We exploit regional and temporal variation

This paper studies the impacts of an environmental bond, which fully covers waste cleanup costs, on a mining firm's optimal actions over the full life cycle of a mine, when bankruptcy may shift cleanup costs to the government. A firm's stochastic optimal control problem is described by an HJB equation with the resource price modelled as an Ito process. A theoretical result shows that under certain

This paper investigates the impact of state and local government highway spending on vehicle emissions. A theoretical framework is constructed to show the effect of government highway spending on passenger and freight vehicle emissions and decompose the effect into a rebound effect, an induced demand effect and an interaction effect. We then develop an empirical strategy and combine state-level data

This paper uses the historical experience of U.S. states to examine the reasons why energy intensity has declined in some places more than in others. In aggregate, U.S. energy per dollar of GDP declined 34 percent between 1997 and 2018, but across states the decline varied from 9 percent in Iowa to 52 percent in Washington State. I show that none of this variation is explained by either deindustrialization

This study examines how the timing of waste disposal fee collection affects the producer’s choice of built-in product durability and social welfare in a durable-goods monopoly model. We categorize the waste disposal fee policies into two: advance disposal fee (ADF) policy and disposal fee (DF) policy. We show that a DF policy has two opposing effects on durability. Firstly, a DF policy gives the producer

Renewable energy is worldwide seen as a key element necessary to address climate change. However, finding socially acceptable locations for renewable energy facilities and the accompanying infrastructure increasingly often faces fierce opposition. This paper quantifies the landscape externalities of renewable energies employing a choice experiment. In addition, it is investigated how accounting for

A prevailing view in the literature states that social sanctions can support, in equilibrium, high levels of obedience to a costly norm. The reason is that social disapproval and stigmatization faced by the disobedient are highest when disobedience is the exception rather than the rule in society. In contrast, the Bayesian model introduced here shows that, imperfect information causes the expected

This paper discusses the efficiency of promotion schemes for renewable energy sources using the example of onshore wind energy in Germany. We analyse whether the scheme incentivised a cost-minimal capacity build-up by developing a model to derive two cost-minimal benchmark scenarios, which are then compared to the historical capacity build-up between 1995 and 2015. The costs of the two cost-minimising

Countries exploiting transboundary natural resources face strong incentives to over-exploit. This basic economic insight has been validated empirically where numerous resources such as water, forests, game, and fisheries are found to be in worse condition than those completely contained in single nations. Attempts to solve this challenge through cross-country cooperation have been largely unsuccessful

We elicit homeowners’ willingness to pay (WTP) for energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies in the context of heating appliance replacement. We employ a within-between subject design that involves manipulating information in a two-stage discrete choice experiment (DCE) and use WTP space estimation to identify the role of financial information in reducing fossil fuel use. We find that homeowners’

Households’ demand for electricity continues to increase. This trend per se should indicate increased disutility from power outages. Additionally, batteries and other back-up systems have been improved, and the frequency and duration of outages have been reduced in many countries. By comparing the results from two stated preference studies on Swedish households’ willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid power

How the valuation of environmental goods is related to income is a key question for economics, but the role of income inequality is often neglected. We study how income inequality affects the international transfer of the estimated value of environmental goods from a study to a policy site—a practice called value or benefit transfer. Specifically, we apply theory-driven, structural transfer factors

The increase in weather and climate disasters in recent years has prompted an interest in analyzing their consequences and the mitigation and adaptation measures that can help minimize their potentially large impacts on individuals’ welfare. We match thirty-one billion-dollar disasters with individual survey data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to estimate the effect of extreme

Most renewable biotic resources are subject to random variability in natural growth. We investigate the implications of such variability for long-term management by a risk averse social planner, who maximizes expected long-run utility. In the canonical model of a stochastic fishery, we show that the optimal level of harvesting effort need not necessarily be reduced by variability in stock growth. However

The shale oil and gas boom has had large economic, environmental, and social impacts on rural communities in the United States. This study provides novel estimates of the impacts of shale oil and gas development on light pollution in rural areas of the United States. Using nationwide, time-calibrated DMSP-OLS database from 2000 to 2012, we find robust evidence that the shale oil and gas boom significantly

Innovation clusters combining public and private effort to develop breakthrough technologies promise greater technological advances to slow down climate change. We use a multi-country model with an emission trading system to examine whether and how international climate policy can incentivize countries to create such innovation clusters. We find that a minimal carbon price is needed to attract applied

Smart meters can promote behavioral changes and water conservation by improving information and providing feedback about water consumption to households. In this paper, we evaluate a large-scale programme implemented by the municipal water company of La Laguna (Tenerife). Exploiting quasi-experimental variation brought about program, we estimate the effect of water meter replacement on measured water

This paper designs a reciprocal dumping model to address the control of industrial pollution between two trading partners. Firms generate transboundary pollution from production and environmental taxes represent the pollution control instrument. We ask whether environmental taxes implemented in a non-cooperative setting are more stringent than the globally efficient level. Relative to the globally

This paper investigates the effects of more stringent environmental regulation—specifically, paying amortized abandonment fees as accrued and absolute liability for adverse events—on the safety performance of Canadian oil and gas pipelines. We construct a comprehensive dataset that includes pipeline adverse events, throughput, and regulatory intensiveness for fourteen federally-regulated energy pipelines

Cap-and-trade programs such as the European Union's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) expose firms to considerable risks, to which the firms can respond with hedging. We develop an intertemporal stochastic equilibrium model to analyze the implications of hedging by risk-averse firms. We show that the resulting time-varying risk premium depends on the size of the permit bank. Applying the model to the

Oklahoma’s households have recently faced several thousand higher-probability but low-impact earthquakes induced by nearby shale gas development. This type of seismic activity is different from natural-occurring earthquakes, which are generally constituted by one, high-loss event. We investigate the mechanisms through which earthquakes may influence household perceptions of risk by modeling changes

This paper empirically examines the effect of the U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards on the technological progress in automobile fuel efficiency. Using detailed vehicle attributes data from 1978 through 2018, we find that more stringent fuel economy standards increase the rate of technological improvements in new passenger cars, and this effect is primarily driven by the response

This paper presents a model of environmental regulations with firms that are heterogeneous with respect to the cost for reducing emissions to the legally permitted level. Given that the enforcement capacity is limited due to budgetary constraints and that each firm's inspection probability depends on its emissions relative to other firms’ emissions, the likelihood of being punished for violations is

We develop a groundwater extraction model that considers the Marshallian inefficiency associated with sharecropping and use data from Pakistan to simulate the impact of an open access regime and of optimal management on groundwater extractions, the state of the aquifer, and annual net benefits through time. We also evaluate a price instrument as a mechanism of inducing optimal extractions. Under both

We investigate whether risk, time, environmental, and social preferences affect single-family homeowners’ investments in the energy efficiency of their house using established experimental measures and questionnaires. We find that homeowners who report to be more risk taking are more likely to have renovated their house. Pro-environmental and future-oriented renovators, i.e. renovators with lower discount

Interest in using information-based interventions to induce energy and water conservation has increased in recent years but have shown mixed evidence of their effectiveness. This paper seeks to answer two main questions - whether these programs are broadly effective in inducing conservation, and what are the most effective versions of these programs. Using a meta-analysis of 116 studies, we examine

Oil booms have been shown to increase local employment and wages. But these effects reflect the aggregated experience of residents, commuters, and recent migrants alike. This paper takes advantage of a unique data set that identifies a rich set of labor market outcomes by place of residence, rather than by place of work. Exploiting this feature of the data, we examine the effect of a major oil boom

This paper uses the sequential panel selection method to examine the convergence of the energy use of 107 countries. It contributes by analyzing the order of convergence and the factors affecting the difference in convergence using improved methods. We provide robust evidence to indicate that seven out of ten countries have been convergent during the period examined, and strong decoupling across countries

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of abatement technology licensing under taxation and emission trading schemes. We demonstrate that a firm with a better abatement technology optimally sells a per-unit royalty license to a competitor under both schemes but offers a higher royalty rate under the latter. The emission trading scheme may outperform the taxation scheme regarding social surplus