We study the consequences of poverty alleviation programs for environmental degradation in Mexico. We exploit the community-level eligibility discontinuity for a conditional cash transfer program to identify the impacts of income increases on deforestation, and use the program’s initial...

Every year between 2000 and 2010, our planet lost native forests roughly the size of Costa Rica. (FAO, 2010). This rapid deforestation has dramatically changed the chemical composition of the world's atmosphere, the level of biodiversity, and the presence of vegetation key to maintaining...

Cost-effective allocation of conditional cash transfers (CCT) requires identifying recipients with low opportunity costs who might change behavior. This paper develops a low-cost approach for improving program implementation by using a stated preference, referendum-style survey question to...

Environmental conditional cash transfers, or "payments for ecosystem services" are a centerpiece of global efforts to protect biodiversity, safeguard watersheds, and mitigate climate change by reducing forest loss. This paper evaluates the impacts of Mexico's national payments for ecosystem...

This paper discusses the gain in efficiency from including deforestation risk as a targeting criterion in payments for environmental services (PES) programs. We contrast two payment schemes that we simulate using data from Mexican common property forests: a flat payment scheme with a cap on...

In this paper we present a continuous time optimal control analysis of resistance buildup in agricultural chemicals when the supplier is a monopolist. We solve a general model and examine the solutions for Cobb-Douglas demand, including a simulation of changes in the interest rate and pest...

Despite the large and growing number of humanitarian emergencies, there is very little economic research on the impact of refugees and internally displaced people on the communities that receive them. This paper analyzes the impact of the refugee inflows from Burundi and Rwanda in 1993 and 1994...