Browsing by Department "Environmental Policy"

Studies on the effect of regime type on public goods provision have tended to take a quantitative, cross-national approach to examining the relationship between regime type and access to public goods, and have demonstrated that democracies produce better public goods outcomes than non-democracies for a variety of theoretical reasons, including politics being more competitive in democracies, democracies needing to appease a greater proportion of their population, and re-election incentives. Such studies, however, have not aimed to understand which segments of the population receive access to benefits and the literature examining this question has tended to focus on the distribution of benefits in democracies. As such, little is known about how authoritarianism itself affects the distribution of public services.

This dissertation examines how inequalities in access to drinking water and wastewater services arise in authoritarian regimes. In examining Egypt during the period of 1882 to 2015, and using archival documents, census data, electoral returns, and interviews, I find that the groups that are prioritized for receiving access to drinking water and wastewater services differ across the different regimes within this time period, as they are a product of the goals that leaders are seeking to achieve and the structure of the authoritarian political system that is implemented, which affects elite composition, the degree of influence that leaders have over policymaking, and the regime’s relationship with the mass public.

I also find that in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, self-undermining policy feedbacks, which occur when those who are not benefitting from government policy that is currently in place push for significant changes in policy, can affect the state’s response to expressed discontent regarding the state of public services, but that democratization is not necessarily correlated with greater investment in public services.

Overall, the findings emphasize that political will plays an important role in affecting the distribution of public services in an authoritarian setting.

Commercial shipping activities place significant strain on one of our most important natural resources as demand for affordable global trade demands ever increasing marine traffic. It has long been recognized as one of the greatest threats to the health of the world’s oceans due to the translocation of invasive species by way of ballasting operations. However, the industry’s role in the global movement of anthropogenic compounds has not been previously investigated. Upcoming regulatory change will further add to the environmental burden as ships will be required to treat ballast water using disinfecting techniques, potentially generating toxic disinfection byproducts. This dissertation was thus focused on revealing current and future potential environmental impacts on the marine environment by using a combination of high resolution mass spectrometry instruments.

Ship ballast water and port water samples were analyzed using both targeted and non-targeted analyses to characterize the organic pollutant burden contained within tanks. This revealed the presence of contaminants derived from both land sources, such as agricultural runoff, as well as compounds associated with shipboard maintenance protocols. Several of these compounds are likely to serve as precursors for disinfection byproduct formation as the shipping industry begins to incorporate ballast water treatment systems. The role of natural organic matter in disinfection byproduct formation was then investigated by chlorinating natural and synthetic seawater. Using a combination of high resolution gas and liquid chromatography paired with accurate mass spectrometry, comprehensive disinfection byproduct profiles were generated to better understand environmental conditions responsible for their formation. A large amount of novel brominated compounds were tentatively identified and should be addressed further prior to global release during ballasting operations. Finally, the ability for continued disinfection byproduct formation to occur beyond quenching disinfection reactions was investigated. This is important to understand further potential risk to sensitive coastal ecosystems beyond the release of treated ballast water.

This dissertation used non-targeted workflows to supplement standard targeted analyses in order to discover compounds that may be of environmental concern relating to the shipping industry. As such, informed recommendations can be made as to the proper environmental conditions in which seawater chlorination should and should not be used. In addition, this allowed for discovery of additional novel disinfection byproducts which can be further investigated for toxicity potential.

High levels of partisan polarization on environmental policies, and on climate change in particular, have led to policy gridlock in the United States. While most Americans rely on their partisan identities to guide their policy preferences on highly polarizing issues, other non-partisan identities may also be relevant in informing environmental policy attitudes. This dissertation investigates the role that partisan and non-partisan identities play in driving attitudes on climate change and environmental policies broadly. In a first paper, I use a survey experiment to test how identity salience influences the effectiveness of a persuasive message about climate change. I find that priming a non-partisan (parental) identity decreases partisan polarization on climate change policy support, while priming a partisan identity increases polarization. In a second paper, I use focus groups, participant observation, and interviews to identify four strategies that individuals use to reconcile conflicting identities and form attitudes on climate change. In a third paper, I use focus groups with rural voters in North Carolina to understand how rural identities inform unique environmental policy preferences. Each of these studies contributes to the broader understanding of the role that non-partisan identities play in driving environmental attitudes and offers a potential way to build more bipartisan agreement in this policy area.

This dissertation examines aspects of the relationship between improved energy access,both in terms of cooking energy and electricity access, and women’s time use patterns, labor productivity, and empowerment in low- and middle-income countries. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and various measures of cooking energy and electricity access across 7 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia using the multi-tiered framework datasets from the World Bank. Since there are many potential facets to women’s empowerment, for example, social standing (i.e., ability to participate in community groups, ability to move freely), employment, or education levels, we use principal component analysis to create an “empowerment index” that captures multiple aspects of women’s empowerment as a singular value. We then use simple regression analysis to study the correlation between women’s empowerment and energy access measures. We find positive associations between empowerment and measures of energy access, though this pattern is not consistent across all countries and contexts.

After descriptively establishing a positive relationship between women’s empowermentand improved cooking energy access, especially in Sub-Saharan African contexts, the second chapter of this dissertation describes an impact evaluation of an improved cookstove distributed in Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. We used a quasi-experimental design to survey approximately 3,000 households across three countries, looking for impacts on women’s time use patterns and labor productivity as a result of take up of the improved cookstove. Using a difference-indifferences approach, we find that in most contexts, this improved cookstove intervention does not result in changes to time use patterns, labor productivity, or time use agency, though the lack of positive impacts may be due to sample contamination, too short of a time frame between stove installation and endline surveys, or reporting errors in modules where time use data is collected.

In order to understand these results in the context of prior published evidence of timesavings from improved cookstoves, in the third chapter, we investigate the population and study characteristics that may impact the time saved in fuel collection as a result of the distributed improved cookstove. Specifically, we apply Bayesian linear regression modeling and Bayesian model comparison to investigate whether and how methodological and contextual choices, such as geography, level of remoteness of a region, fuel use behaviors, the type of time use elicitation method used, and respondent characteristics affect estimates of time savings in fuel collection derived from the cookstove distributed in Chapter 2. Our prior is constructed from 34 estimates of time savings from the improved cookstove literature, while our sampling data is provided by the quasi-experiment in Chapter 2. The approach provides insight on how different sources of variation impact time savings estimates and allows us to make predictions of potential time savings in new settings. Results suggest that the potential for time savings from this improved cookstove is highest in poorer, less educated populations.

In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature by first describing the relationshipsbetween forms of energy access, including improved cooking technologies, and women’s empowerment, and describing those patterns across countries. I then test this relationship using quasi-experimental methods to find causal impacts of improved cooking technologies on outcomes pertinent to women’s livelihoods, including women’s time use patterns, across four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, I provide insight into how population and study characteristics impact time savings results from improved cooking technologies, and in what contexts we might find maximum impact.

This dissertation is comprised of three papers which examine important topics in energy and environmental economics. The first paper ("Averting expenditures and desirable goods: Consumer demand for bottled water in the presence of fracking" with T. Robert Fetter) estimates household willingness to pay to avoid consuming tap water when hydraulic fracturing is present in the area. The paper focuses on accounting for the joint production of utility inherent in bottled water. Furthermore, it introduces a novel estimation routine which accounts for household heterogeneity in a parsimonious manner, and provides evidence of its effectiveness. The empirical results of the paper show that accounting for the utility that households have for bottled water independent of fracking results in a lower bound of willingness to pay to avoid one of the primary sources of fracking impacts.

The second chapter ("Estimating Congestion Benefits of Batteries for Unobserved Networks: A Machine Learning Approach") examines the price effect of grid-scale energy storage. Policy-makers have often identified energy storage as a ``solution'' to the intermittency cost of renewables, but no previous empirical work exists to establish the magnitude of that effect, largely because the price effect of energy storage is not constant across a grid and data on grid structures are not publicly available. This paper estimates the cross-network effects of storage and uncovers the network structure relevant to calculating the total reduction in the cost of serving load.

The final chapter ("Heterogeneous Environmental and Grid Benefits from Rooftop Solar and the Costs of Inefficient Siting Decisions" with Steven Sexton, Robert Harris, and Nicholas Muller) calculates the total reduction in pollution externalities associated with a solar panel across each US zip code. Noting that the marginal plant displaced by a solar panel's generation will depend on the location and time of generation, this paper establishes the chain from panel generation to plant displaced to reduction in emissions to reduction in externalities. Results indicate that subsidies and incentives offered by many states do not coincide with the areas where solar panels generate the largest reduction in externalities.

Each of these papers has important implications for energy and environmental policy in the United States and beyond. Valuing the change in overall social welfare from a new technology (e.g. fracking, energy storage, solar) provides a vital understanding that speaks to the economic efficiency of our energy systems, and helps to provide data and intuition for policymakers who seek to maximize total social welfare. In the first paper, valuing the disamenity of fracking helps policymakers understand the optimal regulation of fracking activity. In the second, estimates of energy storage's reduction in the cost of serving load help to guide debate of future policy. And finally, a better understanding of the siting of solar helps to guide future investments in clean energy technology.

This dissertation includes three papers discussing different aspects of environmental and energy economics and policy. The first paper ("Peaking Interest: How awareness drives the effectiveness of time-of-use electricity pricing") analyzes what factors drive consumer responses to time-of-use electricity pricing. Such pricing is an increasingly common policy that is designed to reduce reliance on high-cost, inefficient, and often polluting power plants. Using both survey and meter data on Irish households, I find that behavioral factors drive consumer responses: consumer awareness and information are key to inducing responses, and marginal prices have minimal effects.

The second paper ("Prices versus Quantities with Policy Updating", with William Pizer) is a theoretical study considering how intertemporal trading ("banking") under cap-and-trade style policies changes the traditional trade-off between price and quantity regulation (Weitzman 1974). Our theoretical model illustrates an unappreciated advantage of quantity regulation: expected policy updates are incorporated immediately through secondary markets via a no arbitrage condition. This helps us understand the welfare implications of observed price volatility in permit markets and has implications for the design of environmental regulations, such as the debate over the relative merits of a carbon tax versus "cap and trade'' policy.

The third paper ("Trophy Hunting vs. Manufacturing Energy: The Price Responsiveness of Shale Gas", with Richard Newell and Ashley Vissing) uses well-level data to estimate how the shale revolution has changed the price responsiveness of U.S. natural gas supply. We find that U.S. natural gas supply is approximately three times more price responsive as a result of the shale revolution, owing entirely to higher production per well. This improves our understanding of the market dynamics around natural gas supply.

Each of these papers has implications for environmental and energy policy. The first paper aims to understand how to improve the effectiveness of time-of-use electricity pricing policies. The second paper addresses an important feature of climate policy design, given high observed volatility in carbon allowance prices in the United States and Europe. The third paper aims to improve understanding of the recent changes in U.S. natural gas markets, with important implications for the fuel mix in electricity generation (in particular, coal-fired versus gas-fired generation) and hence CO2 emissions.

Policymakers are increasingly turning to second- or third-best policy interventions targeted to specific sectors of the economy for mitigating pollution and climate damages despite long-standing agreement among economists that pricing pollution externalities is the efficient (and hence first-best) solution. The essays composing this dissertation explore the rationale for such policy preferences by measuring the environmental benefits of one such policy intervention and evaluating the expected welfare outcomes of calibrated pollution pricing policies. In particular, the first two chapters examine the efficiency and equity implications of rooftop solar policy, an example of a targeted intervention in the electricity sector. The final chapter discusses what appears to be a policy preference for including emission targets in climate policy and then presents an alternative welfare metric that both rationalizes the desire for an emissions target and allows us to evaluate different "hybrid tax" policies.

In the first chapter, "Distributional Benefits of Rooftop Solar Capacity," my co-author Travis Dauwalter and I study the equity and environmental justice implications of rooftop solar policy in the U.S. It is an accepted fact today that households of color and low-income households face disproportionate exposure to pollution and poor environmental conditions. The effects of environmental policies on improving or perhaps even worsening the pollution gap are less understood, however. We provide the first robust evidence on the distribution of benefits of rooftop solar capacity, contributing to the growing economics literature on environmental justice and the distributional consequences of policy. We find the current distribution of environmental benefits from rooftop solar is regressive, but that households of color receive slightly larger benefits per capita than White households. Most interestingly, we demonstrate the lack of an efficiency-equity tradeoff in this context: rooftop solar capacity allocations that maximize total environmental benefits also maximize benefits received by households of color and low-income households. Our results suggest that current rooftop solar policy, reflected at least in part by existing capacity, fails to achieve policymakers’ desired distributional outcomes and could be better targeted to achieve more efficient and more equitable allocations.

The second chapter, "Heterogeneous Solar Capacity Benefits, Appropriability, and the Costs of Suboptimal Siting," co-authored with Steven Sexton, Justin Kirkpatrick, and Nicholas Muller provides the foundation for the first chapter. In this paper, we provide the first zip-code level estimates of the environmental benefits of rooftop solar capacity by estimating marginal power plant emissions responses to changes in electricity load. We use these estimates to compute the total environmental benefits of rooftop solar and show that about $1 billion in benefits would be gained annually were capacity optimally sited. Together, these chapters demonstrate that current solar policy cannot be rationalized on either efficiency or equity grounds.

In the third chapter, "Using Carbon Taxes to Meet an Emission Target," my co-author Billy Pizer and I explore emissions and cost outcomes of simple, rule-based hybrid carbon tax policies, contributing to a growing literature on carbon tax adjustment mechanisms. This work is particularly important as current policy debate in the U.S. has frequently discussed the ability (or inability) of carbon taxes to achieve certainty over emissions outcomes. We show that simple adjustment mechanisms can achieve substantial increases in emissions certainty relative to an ordinary, exogenous tax.

This dissertation is comprised of three research papers that entail implications for public policy. The first two papers are related to environmental policy, and specifically air pollution. The marginal willingness to pay to reduce air pollution is often estimated from the expenditures consumers undertake to avoid exposure to changes in air quality. Consumer awareness of air quality changes is commonly assumed even though limited attention causes decision-making in many settings to vary with the salience of features entering the utility function. The first paper (``Defensive Expenditures, Salience, and Limited Attention'') studies how defensive expenditures vary with the salience of air quality information while controlling for air quality, itself. It uses a 10-year panel data of defensive expenditures, comprised of masks and air-filter purchases from California. Salience is measured in three different ways. First, internet search intensity data from Google is used as a proxy for salience. Second, appearances of tweets about air pollution to Twitter users are used to measure salience. Finally, exogenous media shocks because of California fires are used as a proxy for pollution salience. Individuals are shown to exhibit inattention to air quality, causing estimates to understate willingness to pay for air quality improvements by 20\%.

The second paper (``Air Pollution and Averting Behavior Disparities: Evidence from NYC Transportation'') addresses the inequality in the burdens of air pollution. Exposure to air pollution is a function of averting behaviors that are likely to vary by income due to heterogeneous ability to pay and marginal utility of income. Consequently, poor and minorities may be relatively more exposed to pollution than other demographic groups even conditional on ambient concentrations. Using data on New York City taxi ridership and use of city bicycles, the paper identifies heterogeneous changes in transportation mode decisions across income groups in response to air pollution, exposure to which varies by mode. It shows that (1) high air pollution causes bike ridership to decrease and commute-related taxi trips to increase. (2) The increase in taxi trips is more pronounced in high income neighborhoods than in low income areas. These results suggest that transportation modes that involve higher exposure to air pollution are less desirable when air quality is low and that the utilization of alternative transportation modes to avert air pollution exposure is unequal across income groups.

The third paper (``Do Mask Mandates Work to Contain the Spread of COVID-19?'', with Qingran Li) is related to the recent COVID-19 pandemic disruptions, and studies the effects of mask mandates. With struggling economies and high unemployment rates, policy makers are seeking means to reopen the economy safely. In the absence of vaccines, discussions about mask mandates among non-pharmaceutical interventions emerged, and research is needed for informed, evidence based policy. The paper uses COVID-19 cases data, mobility data, and mask mandates data at the county level for all counties in the United States. It provides evidence that masks reduce cases, and cases conditional on the mobility of residents. The results show that while mobility marginally increases COVID cases, this marginal increase is reduced by 82\% when there is a public mask mandate. The paper also uses the synthetic control method for comparison, and finds causal evidence that mask mandates reduce COVID-19 cases. These findings have direct implications for disease control, and suggest that a mask mandate policy can reduce infection risks, when combined with economic reopening policies.

This dissertation is an empirical study of the livestock industry and its environmental impacts on residents. Concentrated animal feeding operations, abbreviated as CAFOs, are livestock production facilities where large numbers of animals are raised in confined spaces. Although the hog and poultry industries provide jobs and economic benefits, they also produce significant air pollution, contaminate waterways, and affect people's quality of life. North Carolina (NC) is currently the third largest hog producing state in the nation and also hosts a high concentration of poultry farms. Most of the animal farms are located in the eastern area of the state, which is also the area where many low-income people and people of color (POC) reside.

Because of environmental pollution produced by CAFOs, local real estate markets could be affected. Chapter 4 examines how having CAFOs nearby could affect housing price. In this co-authored paper, we utilize housing transaction data from CoreLogic and study the impacts of CAFOs on housing price. We consider co-location of hogs and poultry and separately examine the impacts for houses on private wells and community water systems as water contamination is channeled as an important exposure route. Results show significant housing price reductions for nearby housing properties. The costs increase disproportionately for really large CAFO exposure and are even larger for the houses with private wells. We find that being exposed to the highest levels of exposure to hogs could cause housing price decreases ranging from 13% to 50% for houses with private wells, while only a 13% to 27% price decrease for community-water-dependent houses, depending on the distance between CAFOs and the residential property.

In NC, most of the farms are located in the eastern region, where many communities of color and low-income populations live, and such high concentration raises environmental justice concerns. Chapter 5 explores the relationship between race and income and exposure to CAFOs. In this co-authored paper, we collect information on both hog and poultry farms, use novel micro-data from InfoUSA, and investigate how exposure varies by both income and race. We find POC are more likely to be exposed to both hogs and poultry. Results show strong evidence of high exposure for low-income Hispanic households, compared to white households. Higher income helps reduce the exposure gap for Hispanics, but does not similarly help Black residents, suggesting such uneven exposure patterns are more related to race other than class.

Climate change brings another challenge to CAFOs. During the past two hurricane events in NC, Hurricane Matthew (2016) and Hurricane Florence (2018), CAFOs caused large damages to local communities and contaminated neighborhood drinking water sources. In my job market paper, I first use individual demographic data from InfoUSA to examine household's out-migration behaviors after floods. Results suggest floods make people move out, especially for those with CAFOs around or with private wells. Besides out-migration behaviors, this study also examines how household race and income composition change after floods. Results show more lower-income and POC households move into flooded areas, especially places near animal farms, after floods. Such migration patterns highlight equity concerns under climate change and in the future hurricane events.

While property rights-based management is theoretically purported enhance economic efficiency in fisheries by reducing over-capitalization and extending fishing seasons, the social and economic empirical outcomes are less comprehensively understood. International adoption of rights-based management to manage pollution, fisheries, and water-quality increasingly modifies these management approaches to achieve a wider set of policy goals. Argentina, in particular, interjected economic, social, and ecological objectives into a fisheries individual and transferable quota (ITQ) program through a use-it-or-lose-it penalty, a unidirectional quota transfer restriction between coastal and offshore processing vessels, and a social quota reserve.

The present dissertation utilizes historical data, including legislative documents from 1998 to 2016, monthly fisheries effort and landings data from 2007-2016, and annual data on quota allocation and transfers from 2010-2016, to evaluate the process through which Argentine designed its ITQ program and its social and economic outcomes.

The first chapter is an institutional analysis of the ITQ program in Argentina and lends insight to how and why configurations of rights-based managed differ across socio-economic contexts. The next two chapters build on the results of the first chapter to evaluate to what extent it achieved social and economic objectives through two specific policy modifications: a use-it-or-lose-it penalty and a social quota reserve.

In the second chapter, I develop a two-stage empirical model to evaluate how ecological and economic uncertainties influence intra-seasonal production decisions in an ITQ fishery. The results demonstrate that fresh catch fishing vessels are disproportionately impacted by this policy, relative to offshore processing fishing vessels. This unintended consequence of a policy meant to protect small and medium sized vessel owners could be due to an interaction with the unidirectional trading restriction or the substitution of fishing effort into the more lucrative shrimp fishery.

Finally, I estimate determinants of fishing vessel exit from an ITQ-regulated fishery and evaluate to what extent additional social quota allocation extends the expected lifespan of coastal, fresh catch fishing vessels in that fishery. The results demonstrate that both social quota allocation and participation in the shrimp fishery extend a fishing vessel’s participation in the ITQ-regulated hake fishery.

Together, these results suggest that policy modifications to rights-based management regimes can influence social and economic outcomes, although whether the intended outcomes are achieved depends on the heterogeneity of the fishery, the ability of fishing vessels to substitute effort into non-regulated fisheries, and macroeconomic conditions, such as fuel and export prices.

The innovation and diffusion of new technologies is one of the central concerns of economics. New inventions or technological combinations do not spring fully formed into the world; as firms encounter and learn about new technologies they experiment, refine, and learn about them, improving productivity (and sometimes earning economic rents). Understanding the processes by which firms learn, and how these processes interact with regulations, is fundamental to understanding the emergence of new technologies, their contribution to growth, and the interaction of innovation and regulation.

This dissertation addresses how firms learn and respond to regulations in the context of emerging technologies. Within this framework, I address several questions. When production inputs are socially controversial, do firms respond to disclosure laws by voluntarily constraining their inputs? Do these public disclosure laws facilitate knowledge transmission across firms, and if so, what are the implications for public welfare - for instance, do the gains from trade outweigh any effects of reduced incentives for innovation? I study these questions in the context of hydraulic fracturing, though the results offer insight for more general settings. Panning out to a much broader view, I also explore how energy-related technologies - in both generation and consumption - diffuse across national boundaries over time, and whether innovation and diffusion of energy-efficient technologies has led to more or less energy-efficient economic growth.

In my first paper, I contribute to improved understanding of the conditions in which information-based regulations, which are increasingly common in multiple policy domains, decrease externalities such as environmental pollution. Specifically, I test whether information disclosure regulations applied to hydraulic fracturing chemicals caused firms to decrease their use of toxic inputs. Prior to these mandatory disclosure laws, some operators voluntarily disclosed fluid components for some or all of their wells. I compare the chemical mixtures used prior to the mandatory disclosure laws to those used after the laws took effect, using a difference-in-differences method motivated by the difference in timing of state-level disclosure laws. I use voluntary disclosures to measure the toxicity of fluids prior to mandated disclosure, and thus observe a composite effect of both full reporting and disclosure pressure. These effects likely have opposite signs; I employ several methods to tease them apart so that I can separately identify the effect of disclosure pressure. My analysis, which covers over 70,000 wells in seven states, suggests that state disclosure regulations resulted in a large and persistent decrease in the use of toxic and regulated chemicals in fracturing fluids. This is not the first paper to find that disclosure regulations can change firms' behavior, but it demonstrates such an effect in a setting in which consumer or market pressure is minimal or nonexistent: firms that produce undifferentiated products for an intermediate market, and disclosure policies that do not generate readily accessible or interpretable information.

The second paper tests whether disclosure laws facilitated the transmission of useful knowledge across companies. It is well established that economic agents learn about new technologies in part from other adopters, though even sophisticated firms may not take full advantage of social learning. With my co-authors, I examine whether firms took advantage of environmentally-focused disclosure laws to learn from competitors and improve productivity. We find evidence that they did: following mandatory disclosure we observe convergence in productivity per well, in production inputs, and strong evidence of a link between the two. To our knowledge this is the first study to examine this pathway for social learning in an emerging technology. This could also be interpreted as a form of technology diffusion facilitated by environmental regulation.

In my third paper, I address a broader scale of technology change, looking for evidence that improved technologies for energy generation and consumption have allowed less energy-intensive or pollution-intensive growth in developing countries. I analyze panel data on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and national energy consumption to look for evidence of technology "leapfrogging" (i.e., decreased intensity of energy consumption for a given level of economic growth). I combine 1960-2014 data on energy consumption from the International Energy Agency with historical data that extends back to 1861 for several countries on energy consumption and fuel source, as well as GDP. I compare countries at the same income level and test whether energy consumption and energy intensity are different for today's less-developed countries compared to today's industrialized countries when they had similar income levels. Compared to prior analysis, my much longer time series allows me to test for leapfrogging over a scale appropriate to the pace of widespread technological change.

Ensuring access to adequate quantities of water for basic needs remains a fundamental goal and challenge in many world regions amid the ongoing climate crisis. Yet the uncertainties with existing water supplies coupled with management challenges and rising water demand have shifted attention towards unconventional water sources. Unconventional waters are alternative water sources obtained by using technologies, such as desalination, to transform previously untapped water into drinking water. While desalination is touted as a technical ‘solution’ to alleviate freshwater scarcity by policymakers, businesses, and the public alike, its high financial costs, intensive energy needs, local community impact, and harm to marine life, as well as other yet unseen effects, make it socially, economically, environmentally, and politically contentious. Before the shift towards unconventional waters, and desalination in particular, extends further, it is imperative for informed policymaking to understand how these water options emerge and what constitutes the knowledge base on them.

This dissertation examines how water management is shaped at the level of international organizations and what information on desalination is shared and debated across two other policy-relevant settings: the global media and a local community. It focuses on these three different settings to capture wide information streams that individually and collectively generate some of the corpus of knowledge on water management and desalination. The first chapter examines UN-Water, the coordinating body on international water policy for the UN system, and how it uses expert knowledge to shape the global water agenda, including the foundations upon which unconventional waters become part of this agenda. The second chapter applies automated content analysis to global news media coverage to examine which framings related to desalination’s adaptive and maladaptive features are most prevalent and in what combinations. The third chapter presents a discourse analysis of stakeholder statements and official deliberations tied to the Huntington Beach desalination facility in southern California, which was ultimately denied, to reveal the key storylines that arise both in favor of and in opposition to desalination during permitting debates. This dissertation’s key findings highlight the significance of expert knowledge in shaping global water policy, biases in the current information landscape of desalination as a climate adaptation strategy, and the opportunities for engaging with diverse stakeholders for collaborative decision-making on water management options like desalination.

In recent decades there has been a great deal of interest in using property rights-based management and economic instruments as a means to extract the same resources at a lower cost, while also meeting certain sustainability goals (e.g., biological targets in fisheries). However, these policies remain quite controversial and are even opposed by some of the very same stakeholders who would stand to gain some of these property rights. In fisheries, this issue has an additional dimension that has not received nearly as much attention as the biological outcomes or the cost savings associated with rights-based management: this is the fact that there are a number of differentiated product types--such as fresh instead of frozen, value-added products, etc.--that have the potential to generate more market value. This motivates a broad question as to what extent we can generate more value from the same fish and how rights-based policies such as catch shares interact with fishing behaviors and markets.

This dissertation--and the larger body of ongoing work from which these chapters are drawn--addresses this broad question through a series of specific ones: Do the theoretical underpinnings of revenue-side benefits hold true empirically across a range of catch share fisheries? Do we observe longer fishing seasons post-catch shares, and, if so, does this translate to higher prices/revenues for fishermen through improved market timing, reduced market gluts, and changes in the mix of fresh versus frozen products? Do fishermen respond to revenue-maximizing opportunities that vary not only across time and but also across space once catch shares afford them the flexibility to do so? How do fishermen trade off revenue- and cost-side incentives across target species in multispecies and mixed-management settings? And what do these underlying preferences and behavioral drivers tell us about predicted micro-level responses to new proposed policies? The ultimate goal of this work is to inform the design of rights-based and other management policies so as to maximize the value generated from the resource, and, in so doing, help to minimize the tradeoffs between economic and conservation goals.

The first paper systematically evaluates the theory that rights-based management can lead to higher revenues in fisheries through improved market timing. While follow-on work in Kaczan, Birkenbach, and Smith (2018) explicitly tests for increases in prices received by fishermen for their catch, this paper lays the groundwork by first testing the mechanism underlying hypothesized price increases: namely, that catch shares slow the "race to fish." By securing each individual's right to a portion of the total catch, catch shares theoretically remove the competitive incentives leading to compressed seasons and market gluts and instead give fishermen the opportunity to strategically time their catch to market demand. However, existing evidence of these outcomes comes from selected examples only. In this paper, we analyze natural experiments to test whether catch shares reduce racing in 39 U.S. fisheries. We compare each fishery treated with catch shares to an individually matched control before and after the policy change. We estimate an average policy treatment effect in a pooled model and in a meta-analysis that combines separate estimates for each treatment-control pair. Consistent with the theory that market-based management ends the race to fish, we find strong evidence that catch shares extend fishing seasons on average. This evidence informs the current debate over expanding the use of market-based regulation to other fisheries.

The findings in the first paper, though strong, present a puzzle: if seasons tend to expand for catch share-treated fisheries, why do we observe counter-examples among individual species in multispecies complexes? For example, the season for the New England cod fishery lengthens, but the corresponding season for New England haddock contracts, relative to matched controls. Single-species theory of catch shares and associated market incentives cannot account for these mixed results; thus, the second paper adapts existing theory to more nuanced multispecies settings. We generate predictions about within-season behavior in multispecies fisheries with individual fishing quotas, allowing features such as stock aggregations, effort constraints, and various demand schedule slopes. Numerical results show variation in harvest patterns, including season length, acceleration or delay of harvests, and sequencing individual species harvests. Specifically, we find: 1) harvests for species with downward-sloping demand tend to spread out; 2) spreading harvest of a high-value species can cause lower-value species to be harvested earlier in the season; and 3) harvest can be unresponsive or even respond negatively to biological aggregation when fishermen balance incentives in multispecies settings. We test these predictions using panel data from the Norwegian multispecies groundfish fishery and find evidence for all three.

The third paper dives deeper into the anomalies in the first and empirically tests the new theoretical predictions of the second in a real-world multispecies, mixed-management setting. While a growing body of work seeks to evaluate the impact of catch share programs and other fisheries policy interventions using treatment effects models, these approaches can only identify the net effects of the policy change and not the mechanisms underlying them. As a result, these models may have limited relevance for proposed new (out-of-sample) policies. To learn how catch shares influence micro-level decision-making on the water, we develop and estimate a structural discrete choice model of individual vessel behavior. This work seeks to improve our understanding of how catch shares--and the policies that they replace--influence species targets, timing of fishing activity, and the value generated from the resource. To allow study of inter-species substitutions in pre- and post-rationalization, we implement this model using fine-scale commercial fishing data from before and after the start of the Northeast Multispecies Sector Program. We predict stock-specific production at the vessel-day level in first-stage regressions and use these predictions in a second-stage discrete choice model of targeting decisions that controls for weather, costs, and prices. From this second stage we recover structural parameters that capture how policies affect micro-level incentives. We use these parameters to simulate the effects of removing input restrictions and replacing them with catch shares and to predict behavioral responses to alternative policy specifications.

While the first three papers explore how quota-holding fishermen respond to changing economic opportunities across time, the fourth asks the same question with respect to space. In theory, rights-based management allows fishermen to not only target fish when their value is highest, but also to land and sell them where they will fetch the highest price. But apart from generating potential revenue-side gains, landing decisions also matter to fishery managers looking to incorporate non-efficiency goals, such as equity- or community-focused initiatives, into their quota systems. For example, managers may implement price premiums at disadvantaged landing communities to support commercial fishing activity and the local businesses (e.g., restaurants and processors) that rely on it. Predicting the outcomes of such policies requires an understanding of how fishermen decide where to land their catch, which has received little attention relative to fishing location choices. In this paper, we develop a discrete choice model of landing site choices, using groundfish vessels in Finnmark, Norway as our empirical application. We find that, while fishermen are highly responsive to travel distance, expected revenues are not a consistent driver of landing location choices, which instead reveal a high degree of state dependence. These results suggest that policies altering price incentives to redistribute landings would not be sufficient to draw fishermen away from their preferred landing sites.

Critical race scholarship of the past 20 years offers a robust foundation for interrogating connections between race, place, and environment, and their constitutive impacts on the lived experiences of people of color, particularly black and brown peoples. Less explored are the intersections of race and legal jurisdiction in the production of place inequities. Current scholarship from local government law, geography, environmental justice, and related disciplines suggests understanding the structure and process of municipalities may clarify how local jurisdiction shapes racial inequities in the built environment. This dissertation assesses the efficacy of the municipality as a political institution for equitable, community-sustaining, local development, particularly for black communities. Focused primarily in North Carolina, I assess three interrelated questions: First, I ask whether black and Latinx communities receive the same built environmental benefits from municipal incorporation as white communities. Second, I turn to two black towns in North Carolina to assess the extent to which black communities can rely on independent municipal incorporation to fulfill their aspirations for autonomy and resilient placemaking, focusing specifically on the development of the towns’ local water systems. Third, I consider the efficacy of black community-based institutions in North Carolina and Alabama to provide alternative forms of governance to address structural underdevelopment of black communities, perpetuated by often hostile, white-controlled governments.

Monitoring and enforcement are perhaps the biggest challenges in the design and implementation of environmental policies in developing countries where the actions of many small informal actors cause significant impacts on the ecosystem services and where the transaction costs for the state to regulate them could be enormous. This dissertation studies the potential of innovative institutions based on decentralized coordination and enforcement to induce better environmental outcomes. Such policies have in common that the state plays the role of providing the incentives for organization but the process of compliance happens through decentralized agreements, trust building, signaling and monitoring. I draw from the literatures in collective action, common-pool resources, game-theory and non-point source pollution to develop the instruments proposed here. To test the different conditions in which such policies could be implemented I designed two field-experiments that I conducted with small-scale gold miners in the Colombian Pacific and with users and providers of ecosystem services in the states of Veracruz, Quintana Roo and Yucatan in Mexico. This dissertation is organized in three essays.

The first essay, “Collective Incentives for Cleaner Small-Scale Gold Mining on the Frontier: Experimental Tests of Compliance with Group Incentives given Limited State Monitoring”, examines whether collective incentives, i.e. incentives provided to a group conditional on collective compliance, could “outsource” the required local monitoring, i.e. induce group interactions that extend the reach of the state that can observe only aggregate consequences in the context of small-scale gold mining. I employed a framed field-lab experiment in which the miners make decisions regarding mining intensity. The state sets a collective target for an environmental outcome, verifies compliance and provides a group reward for compliance which is split equally among members. Since the target set by the state transforms the situation into a coordination game, outcomes depend on expectations of what others will do. I conducted this experiment with 640 participants in a mining region of the Colombian Pacific and I examine different levels of policy severity and their ordering. The findings of the experiment suggest that such instruments can induce compliance but this regulation involves tradeoffs. For most severe targets – with rewards just above costs – raise gains if successful but can collapse rapidly and completely. In terms of group interactions, better outcomes are found when severity initially is lower suggesting learning.

The second essay, “Collective Compliance can be Efficient and Inequitable: Impacts of Leaders among Small-Scale Gold Miners in Colombia”, explores the channels through which communication help groups to coordinate in presence of collective incentives and whether the reached solutions are equitable or not. Also in the context of small-scale gold mining in the Colombian Pacific, I test the effect of communication in compliance with a collective environmental target. The results suggest that communication, as expected, helps to solve coordination challenges but still some groups reach agreements involving unequal outcomes. By examining the agreements that took place in each group, I observe that the main coordination mechanism was the presence of leaders that help other group members to clarify the situation. Interestingly, leaders not only helped groups to reach efficiency but also played a key role in equity by defining how the costs of compliance would be distributed among group members.

The third essay, “Creating Local PES Institutions and Increasing Impacts of PES in Mexico: A real-Time Watershed-Level Framed Field Experiment on Coordination and Conditionality”, considers the creation of a local payments for ecosystem services (PES) mechanism as an assurance game that requires the coordination between two groups of participants: upstream and downstream. Based on this assurance interaction, I explore the effect of allowing peer-sanctions on upstream behavior in the functioning of the mechanism. This field-lab experiment was implemented in three real cases of the Mexican Fondos Concurrentes (matching funds) program in the states of Veracruz, Quintana Roo and Yucatan, where 240 real users and 240 real providers of hydrological services were recruited and interacted with each other in real time. The experimental results suggest that initial trust-game behaviors align with participants’ perceptions and predicts baseline giving in assurance game. For upstream providers, i.e. those who get sanctioned, the threat and the use of sanctions increase contributions. Downstream users contribute less when offered the option to sanction – as if that option signal an uncooperative upstream – then the contributions rise in line with the complementarity in payments of the assurance game.

To date, the creation of protected areas (PAs) has been the dominant policy in the efforts to protect forests. Yet there is still somewhat limited rigorous evidence about the impacts of PAs on rates of deforestation. Further, most of the existing evidence concerns the impacts of protection within the boundaries of PAs. Much of that existing evidence does not use the characteristics of the protected lands when generating the baselines to which outcomes on protected lands are compared in order to infer the PAs' impacts. Yet even when impact within a PA has been estimated as rigorously as possible, since the total impact of protection involves impact not only inside the PA but also outside the PA even the best possible estimates of impacts within PAs could mis-state total PA impacts. Overstatements occur if there is "leakage" from PAs, i.e., spillovers of activities to forests outside PAs, so deforestation outside is higher than it would have been without the PAs.

My dissertation starts with a reduced form examination of net local spillovers. We follow this with an evaluation of two mechanisms through which PAs could affect forest nearby. In particular we explore two novel angles by considering both migration choices and road building decisions. PA creation could affect the development equilibrium by shifting private and public expectations to lower migration and road building where the PA is established, beyond the PA's boundaries. My dissertation explores implications of such thinking and provides novel empirical evidence for the Brazilian Legal Amazon.

Chapter 1 estimates deforestation spillovers around Brazilian Amazon PAs. Given PA location bias towards regions with low deforestation pressure, we use matching methods to control for observable land characteristics that may confound PAs' impacts. Specifically, we compare 2000-2004 and 2004-2008 deforestation on the land nearby to PAs with clearing of untreated forests similar in key deforestation determinants. We find that some PAs reduce deforestation rates nearby and, consistent with deforestation impacts inside PAs, those local spillovers vary across the landscape. Reductions are significant near roads and cities − not expected if the result is due to insufficient empirical controls but unsurprising if real impacts are arising due to PAs − and around an understandable subset of PAs. This result contrast sharply with most existing analyses of PAs' spillovers where, if anything, 'leakage' (higher nearby clearing) is discussed and observed. Yet we affirm a more general point that local spillovers depend on local development dynamics.

Chapter 2 examines one mechanism for the prior result that PAs lowered rates of deforestation nearby. Given migration's importance throughout the history of this forest frontier, we ask whether dissuading migration could be a mechanism for protection's local conservation spillovers. Examining individual migration decisions among the Amazon municipalities, we find that Federal PAs − previously seen to reduce rates of deforestation near PAs − seem to encourage outmigration from and discourage migration to PA areas.

Chapter 3 examines another mechanism for the result in my Chapter 1. We consider a recent expansion of the unofficial roads networks in the Brazilian Amazon to provide initial evidence concerning whether PAs may affect such investments in development. Specifically, controlling for prior roads − both official and unofficial − we test whether the growth in unofficial roads between 2008 and 2010 is reduced by establishments of PAs. Thus, we examine road growth as another potential mechanism for forest spillovers from PAs. Controlling for relevant observable factors, and using both matching and OLS, we find that having a large fraction of municipal area in PAs − in particular Federal PAs − reduces the growth of unofficial roads. Such impacts can significantly influence regional development patterns.

This dissertation presents three program evaluations in environmental and resource economics. In the first chapter, I ask whether rural roads can contribute to a reversal of tree cover loss. Prior literature shows roads to be strong drivers of deforestation; however, I hypothesize that in some settings the opposite relationship may hold. Roads may (1) increase the relative productivity of labor in non-agricultural sectors, reducing agricultural activity and allowing reforestation; (2) raise profits from forest management or plantations by linking markets, encouraging forest planting; and (3) provide access to imported fuel sources, reducing pressure on forests from firewood collection. I use a large-scale rural road construction program in India to explore these possibilities. I construct a nationwide, village-level panel, and estimate the impacts of roads on tree cover using a differences-in-differences approach. In aggregate I find that road construction contributed to tree cover expansion, in great contrast to the existing empirical road-forest literature. I also find considerable variation in road impacts across settings within India: frontier settings saw reductions in tree cover due to new roads, while less isolated settings with more established agriculture saw increases in tree cover.

In the second chapter, I apply similar quasi-experimental methods to a very different question: does rights-based fisheries management increase fish prices? Rights-based management, specifically “catch shares,” is known to extend fishing seasons by slowing the destructive “race to fish.” This reduces fishing costs. It may also increase fishing revenues, because longer fishing seasons reduce product gluts that depress prices. I test this hypothesis for the majority of U.S. catch share fisheries (all those with data available) using an individually matched control fishery for each treated, catch share fishery and a difference-in-differences approach. I find evidence for increased ex-vessel prices among fisheries that undergo season decompression; however, highly variable results suggest that there is a need for a richer theoretical understanding of transitions to rights-based management. I discuss effort substitution in multispecies fisheries systems as a possible explanation for this heterogeneity.

In the third chapter, I consider how environmentally beneficial actions can be incentivized by conditional payments (i.e. payments made in return for specific actions or outcomes) in collective land management settings. I use a framed field-lab experiment with participants from collective lands enrolled in a new payments for ecosystem services (PES) program in Mexico. I test the impact of increasing collective conditionality. Because social interactions are integral in collective decision-making, I also test the impact of PES design features that aim to improve group cooperation. Greater collective conditionality raised contributions, with higher impact on lower baseline contributors. Giving groups a way of participating in program rule-setting further improved their cooperation with those rules.

Since the end of the Cold War, natural resources have assumed an increasingly prominent role in security, conflict, and peace studies. Scholars and development practitioners alike view the development of strong institutions, which aim to domesticate global regulatory regimes that foster neoliberal principles like privatization, transparency, and accountability, as necessary to mitigate natural resource conflict in resource-rich states, as well as enhance opportunities for peace and social justice. However, the application of environmental peacebuilding theory to resource-rich contexts has outpaced the ability of empirical research to substantiate its claims, and scholars remain unclear about the mechanisms by which institutional reforms minimize conflict risk or promote peace. This dissertation examines the extent to which the diffusion and uptake of global environmental governance standards has (re)shaped the politics of mineral extraction in Ghana and Sierra Leone. I explore claims that social and environmental outcomes have deteriorated amid efforts by Ghana and Sierra Leone to build regulatory capacity. Using interview, survey, and ethnographic data collected across multiple scales in Ghana and Sierra Leone between 2014 and 2016, I find that while governance reforms have produced strong environmental regulatory institutions in both contexts, these institutions have failed to drive wider social and environmental change within society. Rather, institutional reforms have contributed to patterns of development that undermine state-society relations, and reinforced conditions that promote institutional plurality on the ground. The state remains only one of several options for obtaining legitimate access to mineral resources, meaning that multiple and conflicting sets of “rules-in-use” govern extraction. This perpetuates what I term a “hollow state” in which formal state institutions are continually eroded by informal bottom-up processes. The resulting institutional terrain has produced conditions in which plural authoritative networks compete for social influence as well as access to and control of natural resources. This, in turn, has contributed to chronic, low-intensity conflict, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of elite interests and power at the expense of sustainable resource extraction and livelihood security. Overall, this research suggests a need for environmental peacebuilding theory to reconceptualize linkages between environment, development, and social stability in resource-rich states.

Avoiding adverse consequences of climate change requires policy, technological, and adaptation solutions. The overall theme of this dissertation is to examine the effectiveness of these solutions by exploring firms' and individuals' responses in the context of energy infrastructure investments and climate change. Chapter 1 discusses the interaction of governments' different policy actions in the energy transition. It provides empirical evidence that natural gas infrastructure expansion shifts consumer choice towards gas-powered systems and increases the cost of residential electrification. Chapter 2 studies the effects of technology upgrades and infrastructure investments in the electricity sector. It shows that enhanced electricity infrastructure can reduce electricity losses, improve service quality, and provide climate benefits. Chapter 3 explores human performance effect of heat adaptation and its implications for estimates of climate change damage. It provides some of the first empirical evidence of the magnitude of human adaptive capacity by documenting acclimatization in collegiate athletes.

In the first chapter, "Bridge or Barrier to Net Zero? Gas Infrastructure Expansion and the Cost of Electrification", I investigate the potential cost of natural gas expansion when electrification is a long-term goal. The expansion of gas infrastructure raises consumer valuation of gas water heaters relative to electric ones, significantly raising the market share and sales quantity of gas water heaters. This implies a higher cost of electrifying water heating when gas infrastructure is expanding, as the goal of electrification is to shift consumers towards electric appliances. Counterfactual simulations suggest that, with a 20% increase in gas infrastructure penetration, the cost of electrification rises from 1.4 to 2.2 billion USD, corresponding to an increase of over 50% relative to the status-quo gas infrastructure scenario. The increased cost of electrification will be weighed against both near-term environmental benefits and other consequences from natural gas expansion. The findings underscore a long-run economic burden of utilizing natural gas as a bridge fuel in the transition towards a net-zero carbon emissions future.

The second chapter, "The Economic and Environmental Effects of Making Electricity Infrastructure Excludable" (co-authored with Husnain Ahmad, Ayesha Ali, Robyn Meeks, and Javed Younas), analyzes the welfare impacts of investments in electricity distribution infrastructure. Electricity theft occurs when individuals cannot be excluded from accessing services. We study the impacts of an infrastructure upgrade in Karachi, Pakistan -- converting bare distribution wires to aerial bundled cables (ABCs) -- that was intended to prevent illegal connections. We find that ABCs reduced unbilled consumption, increasing both the number of formal utility customers and per customer usage. ABC installation also decreased the utility's annual CO2 emissions via reduced electricity generation, providing climate benefits. Resulting changes in consumer surplus vary by consumer type (previously informal versus always formal) and depend on reductions in electricity rationing and the cost of prior illegal grid connections. This study provides evidence on a path to mitigate the financial crises facing utilities in many developing countries.

The third chapter, "Heat Adaptation and Human Performance in a Warming Climate" (co-authored with Steven Sexton and Jamie T. Mullims), improves our understanding of human adaptation to climate change, which is essential for valid damage estimates and thereby, the determination of optimal stringency of mitigation efforts. Labor productivity, human capital formation, and income growth decline amid hot ambient temperatures. The implications of such temperature sensitivity for climate change damages depend upon the capacity for human adaptation to persistent temperature changes---as opposed to idiosyncratic temperature variation. In this paper, we provide some of the first empirical evidence of the magnitude of human adaptive capacity and its implications for estimates of climate change damages by documenting acclimatization in collegiate athletes. Acclimatization is an adaptation to persistent heat exposure, which is common to athletes and non-athletes, old and young. Across varied specifications of the temperature-performance relationship, we find that adaptation reduces performance losses from alternative climate change scenarios by more than 50%.

The environment affects our health, livelihoods, and the social and political institutions within which we interact. Indeed, nearly a quarter of the global disease burden is attributed to environmental factors, and many of these factors are exacerbated by global climate change. Thus, the central research question of this dissertation is: How do people cope with and adapt to uncertainty, complexity, and change of environmental and health conditions? Specifically, I ask how institutional factors, risk aversion, and behaviors affect environmental health outcomes. I further assess the role of social capital in climate adaptation, and specifically compare individual and collective adaptation. I then analyze how policy develops accounting for both adaptation to the effects of climate and mitigation of climate-changing emissions. In order to empirically test the relationships between these variables at multiple levels, I combine multiple methods, including semi-structured interviews, surveys, and field experiments, along with health and water quality data. This dissertation uses the case of Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous nation, which has a large rural population and is considered very vulnerable to climate change. My fieldwork included interviews and institutional data collection at the national level, and a three-year study (2012-2014) of approximately 400 households in 20 villages in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. I evaluate the theoretical relationships between households, communities, and government in the process of adaptation to environmental stresses. Through my analyses, I demonstrate that water source choice varies by individual risk aversion and institutional context, which ultimately has implications for environmental health outcomes. I show that qualitative measures of trust predict cooperation in adaptation, consistent with social capital theory, but that measures of trust are negatively related with private adaptation by the individual. Finally, I describe how Ethiopia had some unique characteristics, significantly reinforced by international actors, that led to the development of an extensive climate policy, and yet with some challenges remaining for implementation. These results suggest a potential for adaptation through the interactions among individuals, communities, and government in the search for transformative processes when confronting environmental threats and climate change.