Coral reefs are one of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth. The Mesoamerican Reef contains the largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere. However, its health is threatened, so there is a need for a management and sustainable conservation. Key to this is knowing the economic...

A randomized controlled trial with 945 entrepreneurs in Jamaica shows positive short-term impacts of soft-skills training on business outcomes. The effects are concentrated among men and disappear 12 months after the training. The main channel is increased adoption of recommended business...

Electricity tariff reforms will be an essential part of the clean energy transition. Existing tariffs rely on average cost pricing and often set a price per unit that exceeds marginal cost. The higher price encourages over-adoption of residential solar panels and under-adoption of electric...

This paper provides a general characterization of overall power regulation and a detailed characterization of the ongoing evolution of distributed rooftop photovoltaic (PV) regulation in Costa Rica. The paper further develops rooftop PV adoption models for several classes of consumers and...

This paper examines the allocation of resources of poverty rates within households in Suriname. To this end we employ a bargaining model estimation framework that allows one to identify the allocation of resources across adult and children males and females. Our results using the Suriname...

We randomly assigned consumer loan requests (of random amount and length) to gender-balanced prospective-borrowers who then randomly submitted them to a representative sample of loan-officers from Chilean banks. We find that loan requests submitted by women are 18.3% less likely to be approved,...

When evaluating observably similar loan applications from men and women, do loan officers favor men? This paper randomly assigned loan requests of variable amounts to a balanced sample of male and female prospective borrowers who then submitted the assigned loan requests to randomly assigned...

This paper provides long- and short-run tax buoyancy estimates for a group of 12 Caribbean countries over the period 1991-2017. Using panel regressions , the study found that the long- and short-run tax buoyancy estimates are statistically greater than one. However, the results vary by tax...

The new surge in electric vehicle (EV) charging in Texas can be served efficiently during the early morning hours with large wind generation, low electricity demand, low prices, and low environmental damage. This paper simulates the ERCOT wholesale electricity market and its environmental...

We show that some types of fiscal rules can mitigate the well-known procyclical bias in public capital expenditures. Past research has found that fiscal adjustment episodes coincide with large public investment cuts, a pattern we also document in a sample of 75 advanced and emerging economies...