Insights on the indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are critical for designing and implementing policies to alleviate the food security burden it may have caused, and for bolstering rural communities against similar macroeconomic shocks in the future. Yet estimating the causal effects of the pandemic is difficult due to its ubiquitous nature and entanglement with other shocks. In this descriptive study, we combine high-resolution satellite imagery to control for plot-level rainfall with household socio-economic panel data from 2014, 2016, 2019 and 2020, to differentiate the effect of the pandemic from climatic shocks on food security in Morogoro, Tanzania. We find evidence of decreased incomes, increased prices of staple foods, and increased food insecurity in 2020 relative to previous years, and link these changes to the pandemic by asking households about their perceptions of COVID-19. Respondents overwhelmingly attribute economic hardships to the pandemic, with perceived impacts differing by asset level.

This study investigates the impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown on municipal solid waste (MSW). Based on a unique data set of daily discarding records of 252 communities in Beijing, China, we conduct a difference-in-differences estimation and find that the total daily MSW decreased by 134.16 kg in a community, which is equivalent to at least 0.22 kg per household per day, and the average weight of MSW per package decreased by 56.8 per cent after the COVID-19 lockdown. We consider a series of potential mechanisms, such as MSW hoarding, shifts in discarding time, and fear of going out, and find the most support for consumption pattern shifts with reduced consumption. We then discuss the effect of the lockdown on the reduction of MSW generation because of the strict restriction of consumption. We also conduct various heterogeneity analyses. Our results present clear implications for municipal waste management by highlighting the effect of the lockdown on the generation of MSW and the underlying consumption mechanism.

Have people in China moved from more polluted cities to less polluted ones? We merge city-level air pollution data from 2003 to 2016 with migration data from a nationally representative sample. We estimate a linear model and a conditional logit model, and employ air pollution from distant sources carried by the wind as an instrument for local air pollution to address the potential concern that air pollution is endogenous to local economic activities. We make a distinction between out-migration that left some family members behind and whole-household out-migration, and discover that the former was more responsive to air pollution than the latter. The decline in net in-migration in response to an increase in air pollution was driven by both a decrease in gross in-migration and an increase in gross out-migration. We find suggestive evidence that out-migrants brought their children with them, but some aged parents were left behind.

Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) are significant for poverty alleviation, but are threatened by over-exploitation and climate change effects such as drastic drops in regrowth rates. How will fishers adapt? To shed light on this, we ran a common-pool resource experiment with SSF fishers in Thailand. Our results show that groups confronted with a potential abrupt drop in the regrowth rate are more likely to form cooperative agreements compared to groups not confronted with such a drop, which theory cannot predict. However, groups that form cooperative agreements do not necessarily manage the resource efficiently; many groups under-exploit. Over-exploitation is driven by individual characteristics, e.g., if individuals can diversify income, and if they are born outside the village. We conclude that more systematic exploration of the role of socio-economic factors, and how these factors interact with ecological conditions facing fishers, are needed. Our work can be seen as one step in this direction.

We estimate the impact of subsequent droughts on the revenues of farmers in Ethiopia factoring in their adaptive capacity. We find that after the first drought, there is no significant difference in the revenue of the farmers who experienced a drought, as compared to those who did not. However, there is a loss in revenue after the second drought, specifically for those farmers that are endowed with less assets. This finding underscores that a rise in the frequency of extreme events and shocks can potentially have significant local distributional implications, with wealth as a major distinguishing factor.

Exposure to extreme shocks in early life is found to have a lasting impact in adulthood. Exploiting the variation in exposure measured by age and intensity of an earthquake, we evaluate the impact of a 7.7 MW earthquake in Gujarat, India, on the health stock of children who were in utero or below three years. Using the India Human Development Survey data from 2004–05 and earthquake intensity data, we find an affected girl child to be shorter by at least 2.5 cm at the age of 3–6 years. The earthquake seems to have destroyed the household infrastructures and health facilities, affecting the expecting mothers and newborn children. The households using services to meet nutritional needs of children and pregnant women seem to be least affected. Our findings recommend faster reconstruction activities and highlight the importance of universal healthcare and nutritional delivery services to mitigate the impacts of early-life shocks.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the contribution of land capital to the growth of emissions and income per capita in the long run. We collect new satellite data from the Earth Observatory to obtain estimates of the Enhanced Vegetation Index at the country level for the period 2000–2015. We use these data and the World Bank wealth estimates of natural capital to calibrate and empirically test an extension of the Green Solow model with land degradation and land capital investment. We show that the model is consistent with the cross-country variation in growth rates of carbon emissions per capita and find that there is convergence at the global level, with the contribution of land capital investment to the growth of emissions being negative and significant in all specifications.

Policies designed to control greenhouse gases imply domestic tradeoffs and international externalities, which lead to both domestic and international conflicts, influencing their feasibility and implementations. Our paper investigates two quantitative aspects within this debate. We intend to quantify the impact of: (a) the internalization of international externalities; and (b) the damage associated with a short-term view of climate policies. In this respect, we adopt the innovative (in this field) idea of model predictive control to formalize moving-horizon policy strategies and, thus, to build counterfactuals characterized by a different horizon for all policymakers.

Cleaner cooking is an important policy objective in the bid to achieve sustainable development. Despite efforts to encourage cleaner cooking fuel use, biomass fuel is still widely used in many developing countries. This study investigates the role of behavioral factors, particularly risk aversion, in the choice of cooking fuels in Ghana. In addition, we investigate how the improvement of supply infrastructure and services mitigates the impact of risk preferences in fuel choices. By employing data from the recent round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, we find that risk-averse households are less likely to choose liquified petroleum gas as their cooking fuel. However, the effect is mitigated for households located in districts with more supply infrastructure. Additional analyses reveal the influence of risk and time preferences in other household behavior.

High temperatures have been shown to affect human cognition and decision-making in a variety of settings. In this paper, we explore the extent to which higher temperatures affect judicial decision-making in India. We use data on judicial decisions from the Indian eCourt platform, merged with high-resolution gridded daily weather data. We estimate causal effects by leveraging a fixed effects framework. We find that high daily maximum temperatures raise the likelihood of convictions and these results are robust to numerous controls and specifications. Our findings contribute to a growing literature that documents that the negative impacts of rising temperatures are often more severe in low- and middle-income countries.

Environmental violation by enterprises is a common problem in environmental management worldwide. To restrict enterprises' environmental pollution behaviors, China has implemented a public supervision system based on environmental information publicity, which guides the public to participate in environmental governance and supervises enterprises' environmental pollution behaviors. This study exploits a quasi-natural experiment based on the disclosure policy of the Pollution Information Transparency Index in China from 2008 and the difference-in-differences method to evaluate the disclosure effect of public supervision on enterprises' environmental violations, and to examine its environmental benefits and their realization path. We find that the public supervision system is conducive to the disclosure of enterprises' environmental violations. At the same time, public supervision has achieved the expected environmental benefits, mainly realized by reducing enterprises' output to reduce polluting emissions, and this mechanism is more obvious for high-polluting enterprises.

The potential impact of climate change on international migration patterns has recently received considerable attention, yet much of the empirical literature fails to find increases in international migration due to climate change. This paper attempts to resolve this “immobility paradox” by applying a real-options framework to the relationship between climate change and international migration. This framework suggests that individuals may postpone their migration response to climate change in the face of uncertainty and only migrate once impacts of climate change have exceeded certain thresholds. We test this prediction using semiparametric regression methods which allow us to empirically identify the threshold effects implied by the real-options framework. However, the findings are generally inconsistent with such threshold effects. Rather, the results suggest that in low-income countries, individuals’ migration response is hampered by the existence of liquidity constraints. These are likely to become more binding due to climate change-induced decreases in agricultural productivity.

Natural resource extraction is an important livelihood strategy for poor rural households in developing and emerging countries. Despite the sharp decline in poverty in Vietnam, inequality still exists between the ethnic majority and minority. This paper aims to analyze the impact of natural resource extraction on ethnic inequality. We use panel data from Dak Lak in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that ethnic differences in extraction are due to different group characteristics and different returns to these characteristics. Endogenous switching regressions find that extraction has heterogeneous effects on consumption across extracting and non-extracting households, and between majority and minority households. Treatment effects suggest that extraction sustains the consumption of extracting minority households because their consumption would decline if they stopped extracting. Our results indicate that it is important to improve the natural resource base and the ability of minorities to cope with shocks.

This paper empirically investigates the economic effects of environmental activities. To be specific, it investigates the interactive influence of firms' environmental management and environmental innovation on their productivity. We consider both internal and external environmental management practices of global firms observed from 41 countries between 2017 and 2019. We also consider both inputs and outputs of firms' innovation activities that aim to reduce environmental impacts. Multiple indices are constructed to comprehensively evaluate firms' environmental activities, and productivity is estimated with a semi-parametric method. We find that environmental management and environmental innovation are directly correlated to each other and both substantially promote productivity; however, they tend to substitute each other's positive effects on productivity. Other variables such as globalization, government, labor inputs, and informal competition strongly affect firm productivity too.

This paper re-examines the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) by taking environmental regulation in ambient regions as a critical determinant concurrent with own regulation. Exploiting the Two Control Zones policy in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that both the curbing effect of the local environmental regulation and the spillover effect of ambient regions affect high-polluting foreign direct investment (FDI) location. Moreover, reallocated FDI results in redistributing instead of reducing pollutant emissions. Our evidence enriched by spatial spillover primarily supports the PHH in the context of China. It suggests a national-wide coordinated environmental policy with a unified goal performs better than separately implementing stringent regulations in highly polluted areas.

Payments for environmental services have been popularly used in environmental management and an increasing number of studies assesses their contribution to local livelihoods. This study employs propensity score matching with a dataset of 404 indigenous households in the Central Highlands of Vietnam to evaluate the effect of payments for forest environmental services (PFES) on their livelihoods. Participating in PFES increased households' employment and income from activities related to natural forests. Income from PFES allowed households to enhance productive investment and promote income from cultivation activities. All of this, in turn, increased their annual income, job satisfaction, living expenditures, and reduced the amount of any loan. Additionally, PFES enhanced opportunities to participate in training courses and traditional community activities. This confirms that PFES is not only a good initiative for forest management but also a livelihood policy for communities.

This paper studies the implications of distortions in intertemporal margins for the conduct of climate policy. We do so by introducing a framework that combines a standard two-period overlapping generations (OLG) model with a tractable model of household heterogeneity, in which over-accumulation of capital arises from uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. We illustrate that market-based climate policies must be adjusted when the government cannot provide full insurance to households by taxing only capital and is constrained to transfer resources across generations for risk-sharing. In a numerical exercise, we find that idiosyncratic risk leads to an optimal capital income tax rate of 35 per cent and a carbon price 7.5 per cent lower than its first best.

In this paper, we use a discrete choice experiment conducted among pastoralists in four different semi-arid counties in Kenya characterized by different land tenure regimes to analyze how pastoralists make tradeoffs between tenure security and grazing flexibility – the so-called pastoralist paradox. Results show that there is one group of respondents who are desperate for change and seem to prefer either group or private title deeds to their current situation. A second, smaller group has strong preferences for the status quo, which could be driven by their relatively short migration distances. Concerning index-based livestock insurance, the basis risk suffered by insured pastoralists due to underprediction is high, but willingness to pay (WTP) for livestock insurance should still be high enough to ensure maximum uptake, leaving current low uptakes hard to explain. The worry about climate change is high but does not translate into increased WTP for more secure tenure or formal livestock insurance.

This study investigates the determinants of coffee prices received by growers in Costa Rica, paying attention to the impact of environmental, regional, quality, and international aspects in a panel data set for the period 2008–2016. We identify three groups of variables that affect domestic coffee prices. Some of them are external to the control of the coffee growers, such as the international price of green coffee or the power of multinationals; others, such as the altitude where the coffee is harvested or the berries' yield, are related to coffee quality but difficult to modify by coffee growers. The focus of our study is on the third group, which refers to differentiation strategies related to environmental certifications. More specifically, we consider two particularly relevant certifications, which are Fairtrade mills and organic coffee. We find that organic coffee berries received higher prices, but Fairtrade mills report lower average prices than other, non-certified, buyers.

Recently, in their 2019 paper, Poyago-Theotoky and Yong consider a managerial Cournot duopoly with pollution externalities and emission taxes and propose an explicit environmental incentive in a managerial compensation contract. The authors compare several exogenous equilibria emerging in the symmetric sub-games in which the owner offers either the environmental delegation contract or the standard sales delegation contract: abatement and social welfare (resp. emission taxes) under environmental delegation are higher (resp. lower) than under sales delegation. The present work extends their model using a game-theoretic approach to analyse the asymmetric sub-games, in which only one firm adopts the environmental contract, and adds the contract decision stage. Results show that the environmental contract never emerges as the unique sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium of this non-cooperative managerial decision game. Indeed, if the green R&D technology is efficient, the sales contract emerges as the unique Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium. Otherwise, if the green R&D technology is inefficient, multiple Nash equilibria in pure strategies exist (coordination game). Our findings offer direct policy implications.