This article reviews recent endeavors to incorporate big data and machine learning techniques into energy and environmental economics research. We find that novel datasets, from high frequency smart meter data to satellite images and social media data, are already used by researchers. At the same time most of the analyses rely on traditional econometric techniques. Nevertheless, we find applications

The transformation of the electricity sector is a central element of the transition to a decarbonized economy. Conventional generators powered by fossil fuels have to be replaced by variable renewable energy (VRE) sources in combination with electricity storage and other options for providing temporal flexibility. We discuss the market dynamics of increasing VRE penetration and its integration in the

This survey distills recent work on the price elasticity of demand for urban and agricultural water and outlines how it can inform the design of market-based approaches to manage increasingly scarce water resources. We offer a brief description of the water sector, including the primary users, main water sources, and market failures in the allocation and use of surface water and groundwater. A review

We survey the rapidly growing economic literature on environmental catastrophes and the various approaches developed to address the hovering threats. Various theoretical descriptions of catastrophic occurrences are classified with respect to the uncertain conditions that trigger the events, the postoccurrence dynamic regime, and the form of the inflicted damage. We show that variations in each of these

Global agriculture consumes substantial resources and produces significant pollution. By shifting its production to new locations, and inducing changes in technology and input use, trade has a substantial impact on environmental sustainability of the world's food systems, but due to suboptimal environmental policy, the exact nature of these impacts is in dispute. We review the literature on agricultural

This review provides a description of common and distinct characteristics of economic and ecological systems; examples of the ways in which these characteristics can be incorporated into models adequately describing the coevolution of the two-component systems to produce a unified ecological-economic system in time, space, and appropriate scale; and a discussion of policy design when the policy maker

Many food crops rely on pollination by animals. Historically, wind and wild organisms provided pollination as an ecosystem service that varied across agroecological zones, cropping systems, and time. The value of these pollination services is likely substantial but has not been estimated reliably. More recently, pollination services in major crop-producing regions have been provided through organized

The shale gas boom revolutionized the energy sector through hydraulic fracturing (fracking). High levels of energy production force communities, states, and nations to consider the externalities and potential risks associated with this unconventional oil and natural gas development (UOGD). In this review, we systematically outline the environmental, economic, and anthropogenic impacts of UOGD, while

We survey the growing literature on fat-tailed distributions in environmental economics. We then examine the theoretical and statistical properties of such distributions, focusing especially on when these properties are likely to arise in environmental problems. We find that a number of variables are fat tailed in environmental economics, including the climate sensitivity, natural disaster impacts

The United States and United Kingdom have long-standing traditions in the use of environmental benefit-cost analysis (E-BCA). While there are similarities between how E-BCA is utilized, there are significant differences too, many of which mirror ongoing debates and recent developments in the literature on environmental and natural resource economics. We review the use of E-BCA in both countries across

As of 2020, carbon taxes were in effect in 30 jurisdictions around the world. This article provides a theoretical overview of carbon taxes along with some empirical evidence on the macroeconomic impacts of existing taxes, including emission reductions. It compares and contrasts carbon taxes with other policy instruments to reduce emissions. It also highlights issues that have recently attracted the

In the wake of 25 United Nations Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (and counting), international cooperation on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions to avoid substantial and potentially irreversible climate change remains an important challenge. The limited impact of the Kyoto Protocol on curbing emissions, and the gap between the ambitions of its successor and the Paris Agreement's lack of

This article reviews the recent literature on the developmental effects of resource abundance, assessing likely effects and channels with respect to key development outcomes. To date, this area has received less analysis, although it is relevant to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals agenda, as a significant number of the world's poor live in African resource-rich economies. We argue

With new possibilities offered by information and communications technology (ICT), an abundance of products, services, and projects has emerged with the promise of revitalizing agricultural extension in developing countries. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that not all ICT-enabled extension approaches are equally effective in improving adoption, productivity, income, or welfare outcomes

Irrigation has been a key component of agricultural intensification and transformation in Asia and has the potential to take on the same role in Sub-Saharan Africa. Irrigation has contributed to increased food production, lower food prices, higher rural employment, and overall agricultural and economic growth. At the same time, irrigation—through its large consumptive water use—has accelerated water

Food systems are currently facing unprecedented challenges. More than 690 million people still suffer hunger while climate change, rapid depletion of natural resources, and loss of biodiversity further threaten future food systems. Influential global reports emphasize the need for fundamental transformations of food systems for human and planetary health, but few incorporate economic considerations

In 2010, the White House announced the goal of eradicating food deserts—low-income neighborhoods without nearby supermarkets—in seven years. The efficacy of this initiative is premised on the presumption, mostly untested in 2010, that food deserts significantly contribute to health disparities in low-resourced communities. We synthesize the post-2010 line of research that seeks to establish causality

Agricultural economists have a long history of emphasizing and analyzing the spatial dimension of agricultural and food markets. Despite a rich body of literature and important contributions to agricultural and spatial economics, one aspect is frequently disregarded: the oligopsonistic nature of agricultural markets due to spatial competition of neighboring buyers of farm products. This review presents

We review recent developments in the analysis of price transmission in agricultural markets. Markets may be separated in time, form, and space (as well as in combinations of such factors). Transactions and storage costs as well as production and marketing factors delineate these markets. We show that much of the research on spatial market linkages has reflected methodological advances that have led

The labor supply response to agricultural wages is critical to the viability of crop production in high-income countries, which hire a largely foreign farm work force, as well as in low-income countries, where domestic workers move off the farm as the agricultural transformation unfolds. Modeling agricultural labor supply is more challenging than modeling the supply of other agricultural inputs or

We review the recent theoretical and empirical literature on the capitalization of agricultural subsidies into land prices. The theoretical literature predicts that agricultural subsidies are capitalized into land prices when land supply is inelastic and land markets function well. The share of capitalized subsidies significantly depends on the implementation of farm subsidies, local land-market institutions

Data sets providing repeated observations of land use at fine spatial scales have enabled a new generation of land-use studies. In the past decade, these analyses have put increasing emphasis on empirical research designs that provide more convincing causal estimates. I review the use of instrumental variables, matching, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity design, and randomized controlled

In this review, we attempt to describe the evolution of integrated assessment modeling research since the pioneering work of William Nordhaus in 1994, highlighting a number of challenges and sugges...

The aim of this article is to review a number of issues related to uncertain population forecasts, with a focus on world population. Why are these forecasts uncertain? Population forecasters tradit...

This review covers a nascent literature that experiments with survey design to measure whether the way in which we collect socio-economic data in developing countries influences the data and affects the results of subsequent analyses. We start by showing that survey methods matter and the size of the effects can be nothing short of staggering, affecting basic stylized facts of development (such as

Despite the significant risks and uncertainties that farmers in developing and emerging countries face in their production process, efforts at encouraging them to adopt agricultural insurance to mi...

In urban areas around the world, increasing motorization and growing travel demand make the urban transportation sector an ever-greater contributor to local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissio...

From the perspective of sending countries, international migrants are positively selected in terms of schooling, particularly in low-income countries. While emigration affects human capital accumul...

Despite growing policy commitment and decades of extensive research, nutritional deficiencies remain a key challenge for health systems worldwide. In addition to causing significant personal costs ...

Rising global demand for vegetable oil during the last few decades has led to a drastic increase in the land area under oil palm. Especially in Southeast Asia, the oil palm boom has contributed to ...

The financial system could help achieve the global climate targets by aligning investments to sustainability. However, investors are largely exposed to carbon-intensive assets that could become str...

Assets in the fossil fuel industries are at risk of losing market value due to anticipated breakthroughs in renewable technology and governments stepping up climate policies in the light of the Paris commitments to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. Stranded assets arise due to uncertainty about the future timing of these two types of events and substantial intertemporal and intersectoral

Spillovers among jurisdictions are ubiquitous and likely to increase with increasing population and consumption, so the centralization or decentralization of environmental governance is of pressing...

Cost-benefit analyses have largely failed to demonstrate a positive benefit to cost ratio for programs designed to improve and protect water quality in the United States and European Union. At the ...

We develop a theory of change for payments for environmental services (PES) to review their imminent strengths and weaknesses in light of a growing body of impact evaluation studies. We show that P...

The theoretical literature analyzing eco-label programs has focused mainly on how intricate interactions between firms, eco-label certifiers, and regulators shape these programs’ economic and envir...

The past decades have seen the development of a multitude of sustainability-related food labels aimed at reducing the existing information asymmetry between food practitioners and consumers regardi...

Much of neoclassical economics is concerned with prices—more specifically, with relative prices. Similarly, economists have studied behavior in the face of risk and uncertainty for at least a centu...

The merger of Dow and DuPont, the acquisition of Syngenta by ChemChina, and the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer have recently reshaped the global seed and biotech industry and caused concern about...

We appraise the current status of relational contract theory, along with associated empirical studies, with the goal of providing an orientation to the field to economists who may not have expertis...

Studies examining pricing outcomes in the food retail industry are complicated both by the multiproduct nature of transactions and by the presence of highly concentrated food processing and retaili...

The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus is facing grand challenges in meeting increasing demand resulting from global changes in climate, economy, and population. Emerging technologies are expected to pl...

The world's forests provide valuable contributions to people but continue to be threatened by agricultural expansion and other land uses. Counterfactual-based methods are increasingly used to evalu...

Forests have become an important carbon sink in the last century, with management and carbon fertilization offsetting nearly all of the carbon emitted due to deforestation and conversion of land in...

The Annual Review of Resource Economics presents Professor Sir Angus Deaton in conversation with economist Dr. Gordon Rausser. Dr. Deaton is Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of...

Fertilizer and other input subsidies have been prominent components of agricultural policies in many Asian and African countries since the 1960s. Their economic and political rationale is scrutiniz...

International agricultural research is often motivated by the potential benefits it could bring to smallholder farmers in developing countries. A recent experimental literature has emerged on why i...

Despite the fact that migration out of agriculture has always been a part of the economic development process, policy makers have long feared that migration from rural areas reduces agricultural pr...

Most of the world's displaced people are hosted in low-income countries. Focusing on evidence from poor countries, we review the literature on the economic consequences of hosting refugees or inter...

Urbanization is taking place at an unprecedented pace and scale in China, India, and many other emerging economies. This will have profound impacts on the world economy and environment. This review...

Natural disaster losses have been increasing worldwide. Insurance is thought to play a critical role in improving resilience to these events by both promoting recovery and providing incentives for ...

The environmental justice literature has found that the poor and people of color are disproportionately exposed to pollution. This literature has sparked a broad activist movement and several polic...

Biodiversity is declining worldwide, and the costs of biodiversity losses are increasingly being recognized by economists. In this article, we first review the multiple meanings of biodiversity, mo...

We highlight the extraordinary growth in private conservation via land trusts and conservation easements and describe the problems arising from the interplay of public finance and private decisions...

Precision farming enables agricultural management decisions to be tailored spatially and temporally. Site-specific sensing, sampling, and managing allow farmers to treat a field as a heterogeneous ...

Mastitis is the most important production disease in dairy farming, leading to considerable inefficiency in production. In 1992, an important paper describing a simple but very useful economic fram...

This review focuses on the health and nutrition impacts of food assistance programs. We focus particular attention on the United States, both because of the plethora of types of programs and associ...

The economics of human nutrition has changed greatly in recent years as researchers have moved beyond supply and demand of specific foods and total calories to functional aspects of diet quality, s...

Challenges to the conventional paradigm have isolated industrial agriculture from consumer segments exhibiting preferences for a growing array of credence attributes, including organic, locally pro...

We review the fuel-food price linkage model—time-series, structural, and general or partial equilibrium models, with most attention devoted to the time-series literature. Our assessment is nested i...