Browsing by Author "Pfaff, A"

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    Can information alone change behavior? Response to arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh
    (Journal of Development Economics, 2007-11-01) Madajewicz, M; Pfaff, A; van Geen, A; Graziano, J; Hussein, I; Momotaj, H; Sylvi, R; Ahsan, H
    We study how effectively information induces Bangladeshi households to avoid a health risk. The response to information is large and rapid; knowing that the household's well water has an unsafe concentration of arsenic raises the probability that the household changes to another well within one year by 0.37. Households who change wells increase the time spent obtaining water fifteen-fold. We identify a causal effect of information, since incidence of arsenic is uncorrelated with household characteristics. Our door-to-door information campaign provides well-specific arsenic levels without which behavior does not change. Media communicate general information about arsenic less expensively and no less effectively. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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    Collective Local Payments for ecosystem services: New local PES between groups, sanctions, and prior watershed trust in Mexico
    (Water Resources and Economics, 2019-01-01) Pfaff, A; Rodriguez, LA; Shapiro-Garza, E
    © 2019 Elsevier B.V. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are now high in number, if not always in impact. When groups of users pay groups of service providers, establishing PES involves collective action. We study the creation of collective PES institutions, and their continuation, as group coordination. We use framed lab-in-field experiments with hydroservices users and providers within watersheds participating in Mexico's Matching Funds program in Veracruz, Yucatan and Quintana Roo states. We explore the coordination of contributions between downstream users and upstream providers, plus effects of different types of sanctions that can affect expectations for both users and providers. Both information alone and sanctions raise contributions overall, although outcomes varied by site in line with our rankings of ‘watershed trust’. For instance, monetary sanctions raise contributions in the watershed we ranked high in trust, yet initially lowered them for the lowest-trust watershed. This suggests that upstream-downstream social capital will be central to new collective local PES, while our overall trends suggest social capital can be raised by successful coordination over time.
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    Increasing the impact of collective incentives in payments for ecosystem services
    (Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2017-07) Kaczan, D; Pfaff, A; Rodriguez, L; Shapiro-Garza, E
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    Paper park performance: Mexico's natural protected areas in the 1990s
    (Global Environmental Change, 2015-01-01) Blackman, A; Pfaff, A; Robalino, J
    © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.Although developing countries have established scores of new protected areas over the past three decades, they often amount to little more than "paper parks" that are chronically short of the financial, human, and technical resources needed for effective management. It is not clear whether and how severely under-resourced parks affect deforestation. In principle, they could either stem it by, for example, creating an expectation of future enforcement, or they could spur it by, for example, creating open access regimes. We examine the effect of Mexico's natural protected areas (NPAs) on deforestation from 1993 to 2000, a period when forest clearing was rampant and the vast majority of protected areas had negligible resources or management. We use high-resolution satellite data to measure deforestation and (covariate and propensity score) matching to control for NPAs' nonrandom siting and for spillovers. Our broad finding is that Mexico's paper parks had heterogeneous effects both inside and outside their borders. More specifically, at the national-level, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that NPAs had zero average effect on clearing inside their borders, nor can we reject a similar hypothesis for spillover clearing outside their borders. However, we can detect statistically and economically significant inside- and outside-NPA effects for certain geographic regions. Moreover, these effects have different signs depending on the region. Finally, we find that NPAs with certain characteristics were more effective at stemming deforestation inside their borders, namely, those that were large, new, mixed use, and relatively well-funded. Taken together, these results suggest that paper parks have the potential to either reduce or exacerbate tropical deforestation and highlight the need for further research on the conditions that lead to each outcome.
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    Road Investments, Spatial Intensification and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
    (Journal of Regional Science, 2007-02) Pfaff, A; Robalino, JA; Walker, R; Reis, E; Perz, S; Bohrer, C; Aldrich, S; Arima, E; Caldas, M