Browsing by Subject "Environmental economics"

Despite the threats to morbidity, mortality, and human capital accumulation posed by environmental risks, investments in environmental health technologies remain low. This is especially evident in low- and middle-income countries, which disproportionately shoulder the burden of environmental risk exposure and consequence. Households face competing risks associated with poor air and water quality, necessitating choices about how to invest in technologies to reduce the consequences associated with their exposures. Yet, even in areas where access to environmental health technologies such as improved cookstoves, latrines, and insecticide-treated bednets has expanded and products are subsidized to make them more affordable, adoption and use of these technologies often lag. This dissertation examines some of the conditions that impact environmental health technology adoption and use decisions as well as the health implications of low investment.

In Chapter 1, I ask how air pollution exposure drives consumption behaviors and impacts health outcomes. I examine this question in the short term--asking how behavior and health respond to a large, yet transitory, spike in ambient air pollution--as well as over time--considering the responses to average ambient air pollution levels over a period of 19 years. I leverage variation in air pollution resulting from forest fire emissions in Indonesia between 1996 and 2015 to generate short-term exposure spikes and average exposures over time, and I combine these exposures with four waves household and individual-level survey data. I implement a cross-sectional, difference-in-difference analysis to estimate the immediate effects of an unexpectedly severe forest fire season in 2015, finding increased fuel demands among the most-exposed households as well as declines in lung capacity among emissions-affected children. I extend my analysis across the panel using an instrumental variables approach to estimate consequences of average exposure over time. I find that households facing higher average ambient air pollution exposures are more likely to utilize clean cooking fuels such as LPG. Even with these behavioral adjustments, more-exposed individuals face significant reductions in lung capacity. In line with existing literature, I find negative health implications resulting from short-term exposure shocks; however, my analysis demonstrates that these respiratory consequences are not fleeting, particularly in areas that experience elevated average ambient air pollution levels.

In Chapter 2, I turn to environmental risks posed by limited access to improved sanitation technologies to examine how social influences impact household sanitation decisions. Using three waves of data collected immediately before, a few months after, and a few years after a randomized latrine promotion campaign in rural Orissa, India, I evaluate the extent to which social influences impact sanitation choices. I find that a ten percentage point decrease in neighbors' open defecation reduces a household's likelihood of open defecation by 3-4 percentage points. The sanitation intervention decreased open defecation in the short term; however, this treatment was less effective in neighborhoods with higher rates of open defecation due to strong social effects. Disaggregating social effects by gender, I find that both women and men respond to sanitation behaviors among male neighbors in the short term and female neighbors in the longer term, perhaps because men have more control over initial latrine purchasing decisions while women are more influential in sustaining latrine use over time.

Finally, in Chapter 3, I expand on my analysis of social influences and sanitation practices and examine how households make decisions to contribute to collective action for sanitation. In this chapter, I analyze data from an experimental public goods game I designed and implemented among over 1500 households in rural Bihar and Orissa, India. I randomly assigned each of the 70 villages in the sample into groups that are either homogeneous or heterogeneous by gender for game play. In the context of rural India, individuals are more likely to frequently interact with and make decisions in front of others of the same gender. Thus, splitting the groups in this way provides a proxy for peer or social groups. Participants chose how much to contribute to improved sanitation by making decisions in the game that are associated with actual sanitation and hygiene choices they face every day. Payoffs were awarded after each round, and payoff amounts were dependent on both individual contributions and aggregated group contributions, generating a setting in which the benefits participants received were connected. Comparing the game behavior among participants in groups that were homogeneous and heterogeneous by gender, I find evidence that contributions to collective action for sanitation are higher in gender homogenous groups. Female participants drive this difference, and it is more distinct in the first round of game play. I also find evidence that preferences for improved sanitation as elicited during the experimental games are reflective of actual improved sanitation practices at the household level.

In the spirit of American individualism, the majority of the United States’ forested landscape is controlled by private landowners, who make autonomous decisions that impact a shared wealth of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is important to understand not only the forest management decisions made by private landowners, but also the motivations that incentivize these consequential actions. Furthermore, it is useful to have the capacity to infer such insights using publicly available data, and by employing transparent, flexible, and scalable statistical frameworks. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the motivations and actions of private landowners in the United States using a variety of data sources, including Zillow home estimates, the American Community Survey, satellite remote sensing imagery, and the Forest Inventory and Analysis database, and by implementing interpretable modeling frameworks, such as the hedonic pricing method and structural equation modeling. I uncover nuanced insights about human-environmental systems, including (1) a positive feedback loop between affluence and tree-shading in metropolitan areas; (2) the dominance of normative pressures on forest owners’ harvest intentions; and (3) a causal link between invasive insects and the quantity and sizes of harvested trees. Understanding such relationships benefits policymakers, forest managers, and urban planners tasked with optimizing human-natural systems.

Cooking fuel “stacking,” or the use of multiple types of fuels, can be problematic in interventions when households are using both clean and dirty fuels at the same time. Dirty fuels such as firewood contribute to indoor air pollution, cause detrimental health effects, and are inefficient forms of energy. In this study, cooking fuel preference data was collected from 360 households in peripheral-urban Kathmandu, Nepal during August 2019. Respondents provided fuel information and gave economic preferences for a contingent valuation experiment on their reported primary fuel type. We explored two aims through multiple regression analyses: the relationship between fuel stacking behavior and willingness to pay (WTP), and the household characteristics associated with fuel stacking behavior. The analyses showed that stacking does not affect WTP, and household expenses are a significant factor associated with WTP only among households using LPG as their primary fuel. The secondary aim found that the main household characteristics associated with fuel stacking are household size, firewood gathering behavior, and if the household was affected by the 2015 LPG blockade. The relationships of these characteristics are complex and depend on whether the household is using more LPG or more firewood when stacking. More research is needed to better understand fuel stacking, and why most people in peri-urban Kathmandu prefer LPG as their primary fuel.

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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.

The essays in applied microeconomics contained within this dissertation examine prices in the developing economy contexts of Indonesia and the Philippines. Prices, observed and unobserved, are determined by and incentivize the behavior of all agents in the economy. Prices describe the interaction of individuals within a household and households within a market and reveal traits critical for development. Traits such as the efficiency of household resource allocations and the completeness of markets are analyzed in Central Java, Indonesia using a rich, longitudinal survey containing detailed price data used to estimate household demand systems. Unobserved, implicit prices of environmental goods are analyzed in the context of the Philippines. The valuation of environmental quality's implicit price is illustrated by comparing the health and human capital outcomes of the highly and least exposed. Exposure to environmental toxins can produce short and long-term damages to health and human capital reflecting undervaluation of the implicit price of environmental quality. The combined results of these essays on prices in development economics reveal allocation inefficiencies within the household and the economy and provide direction for development policy around the world.

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 comprised of three chapters in industrial organization, environmental economics and energy economics. In Chapter 2, I study carbon dioxide emission abatement technology for industries participating in the world’s biggest emissions market, the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS). I propose a production and abatement model to motivate the use of emissions as an input in a production function. I build on recent methods of the production function literature and propose an estimator for the production function that is consistent with my model. Using data from the EU ETS and Orbis, I estimate the elasticity of emissions to abatement expenditures for different manufacturing industries. Increasing the share of abatement expenditures of revenues by 1% is expected to reduce emissions by 8% in cement and 67% in chemicals, with other industries between these two extremes. I use the model's implications to translate estimated abatement elasticities to marginal abatement costs at the individual firm level. My findings show enormous differences both within and across industries. My estimates for the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile cement firms are 15, 22 and 36 euro/t respectively. In contrast, these estimates are 22, 48 and 363 \euro/t for oil refineries. My findings suggests that, cement, chemicals and power firms are the most likely to decrease emissions as the EU ETS market price rises to levels close to the social cost of carbon.

In Chapter 3, I analyze the impact of different policy instruments on the speed of transition to cleaner electricity generation. I develop a non-stationary fully dynamic entry and exit model of power generation. My model includes multiple technologies and hourly spot markets, both key features of the power generation market. I use the calibrated model to analyze the speed of transition away from coal power plants in PJM, the biggest electricity system in the United States. Correcting the negative externality of carbon dioxide emissions requires environmental regulation. My findings highlight the importance of analyzing the full transition path when comparing environmental policy instruments. Policies that lead to similar long-term outcomes induce vastly different transition dynamics. A carbon tax (the efficient instrument) set to $30/ton carbon dioxide is associated with an almost immediate entry of the long-run gas capacity. In contrast, gas entry and coal exit result in a slower and smooth transition. Welfare differences are significant. Both of these instruments improve only marginally on the baseline scenario and do not come close to the improvement possible by the carbon tax.

In Chapter 4, I study bidding behavior in the New England frequency regulation market. Since 2015, this product is procured through a multi-dimensional Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction. Bidding under a VCG design is simple since truthful bidding is optimal. However, I find that participants bid higher when relative market power increases. This is indirect evidence against truthful bidding. Taking VCG bids as estimates for true marginal cost can be misleading. A combination of a complicated clearing mechanism and low stakes might prevent players to learn the optimal bidding strategy. My results suggest that switching from a uniform price to a VCG auction does not resolve the underlying strategic complexity.

This thesis focuses on multiple themes in the field of public economics with intersectionsin development economics, environmental economics, and political economy. The overarching themes of this work are focuses on the city, institutions, and economic and environmental justice. The first chapter examines on the impact of lead abatement laws on eviction. The second chapter evaluates Myanmar’s National Community Driven Development Program. The final chapter examines the role of one’s representative on their home’s price. An abstract of each chapter is as follows:

Lead paint in old houses is the leading cause of leadpoisoning in children under 6 today. To combat this problem, several states have passed lead abatement laws, forcing landlords to remove lead in the homes they rent if tenants have children under the age of 6. However, these laws have unintended consequences, causing landlords to evict tenants rather than abate lead. I use a difference-in-differences approach while employing various model specifications with various fixed effects and sets of controls to examine the impact of Ohio’s 2003 lead abatement law on eviction rates. Using newly collected data from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, I find that the passage of Ohio’s lead abatement law sharply increased targeted evictions. Due to the law’s passage, the average census district in Ohio faced an increased eviction rate of roughly 0.457 points, corresponding to an additional 13.93 evictions a year. These impacts are highly statistically significant, sizeable, and economically meaningful, indicating that policy makers should incorporate distributional consequences when designing future lead abatement laws in order to avoid unintended consequences and ensure equitable outcomes.

Community driven development (CDD) has become acommon method of distributing aid throughout the developing world. Founded on two guiding principles, decentralization of the aid distribution process and empowerment through participation, CDD programs encourage community involvement in all steps of the development project. We evaluate Myanmar’s National Community Driven Development Program (NCDDP) by implementing a regression discontinuity design in sampling that takes advantage of the discontinuous cutoff in program receipt at the township border by sampling matched pairs of villages across program borders. We find that CDD successfully delivers village infrastructure, in line with the results of previous CDD evaluations. Moreover, in contrast to previous findings in the literature, we find large positive effects of CDD enrollment on the diversity and quality of local governance structures and greater participation of women and ethnic minorities. Finally, we provide novel evidence that these changes in local governance are associated with detectable improvements in local public goods provision beyond the scope of the CDD program, as measured by village-level responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, CDD villages enact more significantly more of the recommended measures to contain the spread of disease. These results provide evidence that CDD participation Congressional and state representatives and their parties use their political power to send kickbacks to their districts, providing funding for public goods and targeted investment within their district. However, representatives do not have an equal ability to do this, as those with longer tenure, important committee posts, and in more competitive districts have the ability to send more kickbacks to their districts. I estimate the impact of one's representative and district, at the state house, state senate, and congressional level, on housing prices using the 2010 redistricting to identify the impact of one's representative on housing prices. I first develop a model of political competition and housing prices with testable implications to bring to the data. Using data from InfoUSA, containing roughly 130 million housing transactions per year, from 2006 to 2014, combined with data on state and federal representatives, I identify and examine the impact of one's representative on housing prices using multiple methods, including location fixed effects, a regression discontinuity design, and an instrumental variables design. I find that "packing" districts so that they are not competitive is not only used to dilute voting power, but dilute local wealth as well, that more powerful representatives use that power to increase the value of their constituents' homes, and that representatives in the party in control of the respective house are able to use this power to send kickbacks to their constituents. Not only does partisan gerrymandering come at a social and political cost, but a great economic cost as well.

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.

This dissertation contributes to the fields of environmental, natural resource and development economics. It contains three essays, each tackling related but different sets of questions by developing theoretical, analytical and econometric methods for policy relevant analysis. In the first essay I develop theoretical models to discuss how fossil fuel firms may respond to anticipated climate friendly policies by intensifying resource extraction from existing reserve bases (green paradox) and/or by reducing investments in expansion of the pool of extractable reserves. In the second essay I construct theoretical models to discuss the design of institutions for regulation of novel climate altering geoengineering technologies by first exploring the dangers of a lack of carbon policy commitment and then suggesting institutional solutions that draw from the monetary policy literature. Finally in the third essay, I consider the design of a multiple cut-off regression discontinuity design and show how it can be used to answer policy relevant questions in development economics in situations involving multiple treatments and treatment conditions. Collectively, the studies involve theoretical ideas and concepts that help understand the impact of policy uncertainty, think about the design of institutions for policy governance and estimate the impacts of past implemented policies.

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 changes to the environment caused by anthropogenic climate change pose major challenges for energy production in the next century. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a group of technologies that would permit the continued use of carbon-intense fuels such as coal for energy production while avoiding further impact on the global climate system. The mechanism most often proposed for storage is injection of CO2 below the surface of the Earth in geological media, with the most promising option for CO2 reservoirs being deep saline aquifers (DSA's). Unlike oil and gas reservoirs, deep saline aquifers are poorly characterized and the variability in their properties is large enough to have a high impact on the overall physical and economic viability of CCS. Storage in saline aquifers is likely to be a very high-capacity resource, but its economic viability is almost unknown. We consider the impact of geological variability on the total viability of the CO2 storage system from several perspectives. First, we examine the theoretical range of costs of storage by coupling a physical and economic model of CO2 storage with a range of possible geological settings. With the relevant properties of rock extending over several orders of magnitude, it is not surprising that we find costs and storage potential ranging over several orders of magnitude. Second, we use georeferenced data to evaluate the spatial distribution of cost and capacity. When paired together to build a marginal abatement cost curve (MACC), this cost and capacity data indicates that low cost and high capacity are collocated; storage in these promising areas is likely to be quite viable but may not be available to all CO2 sources. However, when we continue to explore the impact of geological variability on realistic, commercial-scale site sizes by invoking capacity and pressure management constraints, we find that the distribution costs and footprints of these sites may be prohibitively high. The combination of issues with onshore storage in geological media leads us to begin to evaluate offshore storage potential. By considering the temperature and pressure regimes at the seafloor, we locate and quantify marine strata that has "self-sealing" properties, a storage option that we find is plentiful off the coasts of the United States. We conclude that further research into transport optimization that takes into account the true variation in geological media is necessary to determine the distribution of costs for carbon capture and storage to permit the full evaluation of CCS as a mitigation option.

This dissertation examines the potential of information-provision in motivating behavior that reduces human exposure to arsenic in drinking-water in Bangladesh. In chapter 2, the longer-term effects of the countrywide arsenic-testing and information-program are examined by tracking tube-well switching behavior of households over a five-year period. Chapter 3 focuses on the effects of arsenic information communication formats on tube-well switching behavior, by employing a randomized field experiment. In chapter 4, an instrumental variables approach is used to understand whether a household's decision to switch sources is affected by its proximate neighbors' decisions to switch sources. To answer these questions, primary data was collected by the researchers through field-work in Bangladesh. The results suggest that arsenic-testing and information-provision programs produce persistent behavioral changes that reduce exposure to arsenic, with their impact increasing over time. Comparing the impacts of risk-communication formats, we find that quantitative formats do not significantly increase source-switching behavior, in comparison to that generated by qualitative formats. Lastly, despite econometric identification issues, our data suggest that households gather information about source-switching by observing the actions of their neighbors. In sum, the results presented in this dissertation suggest that the provision of information to rural households can motivate health-improving behavior that reduces households' exposure to arsenic in Bangladesh. This dissertation contributes to the use of information disclosure as a policy instrument to reduce exposure to environmental contaminants.