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Contests are widely used as mechanisms to incentivize efforts in various contexts, from research innovation to athletic and employee performance. This paper builds an analytical model and provides empirical evidence to assess the effectiveness of a large-scale, real-world residential energy conservation contest in Vietnam. The model suggests that contests offering multiple prizes and requiring a minimum amount of effort can effectively promote conservation. It also identifies factors that influence the conservation effort, such as the cost of effort, size of prizes, and types of contestants. To empirically estimate the effect of the energy conservation contest, this paper uses a unique confidential dataset of monthly residential electricity usage with over 45 million observations. The results indicate that the contest significantly reduced electricity consumption among contestants, and the effect of the contest could persist for months after its conclusion, leading to an average abatement cost of $27 per ton of CO2 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The timing of climate adaptation decisions can have substantial consequences for the assessment of climate damages. Since weather variability can create risks for natural resource management that differ across adaptation choices, such variability has the potential to alter the speed of climate adaptation. This paper estimates the effect of weather variability on the timing of adaptation decisions of forest landowners in the Eastern United States. A discrete-choice econometric model of forest management is estimated and used in a bio-economic simulation that shows how variability in cold temperatures can significantly slow the rate of adapting from cold-tolerant natural hardwood forests to cold-sensitive, but highly valuable pine plantations. The range of weather variability in climate projections and across the landscape generates large differences in adaptation timing. Ignoring projected future decreases in weather variability results in a large downward bias in estimating future paths of climate adaptation. Since pine plantations produce fewer non-market ecosystem services than natural hardwood forests, an important source of future conservation uncertainty is the economic response of private forest landowners to changing weather variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates flexible demand systems for heterogeneous households in the United States and links the estimated parameters with an economy-wide model to assess their relative contributions to the social cost of regulation. We estimate elasticities for several final demand categories as well as labor-leisure elasticities that are important for calibrating the labor-leisure choice in the economy-wide model and find that estimated elasticities are relatively similar across regions but vary meaningfully by income. Using the estimated elasticities, we explore the implications of both the functional form and its parameterization in a simplified computable general equilibrium model for the social and distributional costs of illustrative policy scenarios. Model variants with less flexible consumer demand systems overestimate social costs across our entire range of scenarios. Furthermore, we find that parameterizing the model with elasticities that vary with household income is important for adequately characterizing the distributional implications of a policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many renewable natural resources have been extracted beyond sustainable levels. While some resource stocks have recovered, others are still over-extracted, causing substantial economic losses. This paper develops a model motivated by empirical facts about resource use and regulation to understand these patterns. The model is a dynamic model of a dual economy with technological progress, structural change, and costly resource regulation. Based on this model, we show that technological progress explains the initial increase in resource use. Technological progress also induces structural change and a decline in resource users. While the declining number of resource users does not directly lead to resource recovery, it does reduce regulatory costs, paving the way for resource regulation and recovery. Our results show that although technological progress can contribute to resource degradation, it also helps resource recovery through reduced regulatory costs. Our results suggest further that a temporal use beyond sustainable levels can be socially optimal until regulatory costs fall below the benefits of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of early climate policy in emerging economies by causally evaluating the impact of China's Low-carbon City Pilot (LCCP) on city-level per-capita CO 2 emissions and CO 2 intensity of GDP over the period 2003–2017. The idiosyncrasies of the policy design pose significant challenges for causal identification, which we overcome within a synthetic control framework. Contrary to previous contributions, our results suggest that the LCCP had no significant impact on either carbon emissions or intensity. The main takeaway of our empirical investigation is that even in emerging economies, effective environmental policy requires transparent, quantifiable targets, and credible enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the literature on the potential negative employment effects of environmental policy by bringing to the fore a key factor that directly regulates its magnitude: the elasticity of substitution between labor and energy. Using firm-level data from the French manufacturing sector and addressing endogeneity concerns, we provide empirical estimates that point to strong complementarity between labor and energy. We then investigate the empirical relevance of the elasticity of substitution in studying firms' response to changing energy prices. Our findings suggest that the negative employment effects of rising energy prices are largely driven by firms with limited substitution capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a simple theoretical extension from the Economic Geography literature to characterize the main features of pollution havens (lax environmental regulation, good market access to high-income countries and corruption opportunities). Using structural and reduced-form estimations, we find that pollution havens are not a “popular myth” for European firms, laxer environmental standards significantly explain the location choice of polluting affiliates. We analyze in depth the role of trade costs (using various bilateral and multilateral measures), a 1% increase in access to the European market from a pollution haven fosters relocation there by 0.1%. We also find that corruption lowers environmental standards, which strongly attract polluting firms: a 1% increase of corruption fuels relocation by 0.28%. We test the economic significance of these empirical findings via simulations. The protection of the European market (e.g., a carbon tax on imports) to stop relocations to pollution havens must be high (a decrease of the European market for Morocco and Tunisia equivalent to 13%) not to say prohibitive (31% for China). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the extent of water saving technologies usage and evaluates their impacts on water use, water productivity, total irrigated sown area and crop mix in North China. A set of panel data collected at the househol.d and plot levels is used in empirical analysis. Water saving technologies are categorized into traditional technologies, household-based technologies and community-based technologies. By 2007, traditional technologies and household-based technologies are used in almost all sample villages. However, the shares of sown area on which water saving technologies are used are still fairly low. Econometric analysis using plot level fixed effects show that using water saving technologies can reduce crop water use and improve the productivity of water. The positive effects are generated mainly through the use of household-based or community-based technologies. The use of water saving technologies does not have statistically significant impacts on total irrigated sown area and crop mix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the environmentally induced behavioral biases in the land market and shows how buyers correct their biases by learning from repeated transactions. Using a sample of government land sales along two sides of the heating service line in China, we first show land parcels transacted in the south in the winter are associated with an average price discount of 7.1%, compared to transactions in the north where heating service is provided. We discuss three possible explanations, including projection bias, incorrect belief, and salience bias. We find adverse weather such as low temperature and extreme weather may trigger the mispricing in the absence of the heating service, lending support to the projection bias. Moreover, our empirical investigations suggest the local government, as the only land seller, responds weakly to such biases. We also provide suggestive evidence that individual buyers in the south can learn from prior experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation spending aimed at helping threatened species lacks information on the marginal benefits of increases in the abundance of threatened species that occur at different points in time. This paper develops an empirical approach combining a choice experiment and a structural model to estimate two key parameters in a dynamic willingness-to-pay function: the current marginal benefit of increases in threatened species abundance and the rate implicitly used to discount future marginal benefits. An application to a threatened Coho salmon along the Oregon coast illustrates the method. We find that the public values a one-year marginal increase in Coho abundance of 1000 fish from $0.08 to $0.19 per household with a discount rate for future increments in salmon abundance of 2.1%. We apply these results to an instantaneous and permanent marginal increase in salmon abundance of 0.79% resulting from a policy change in one watershed and show this marginal change can generate over $63 million in present value of social marginal benefits to the greater Pacific Northwest region. Results provide direct evidence that conservation activities that achieve immediate abundance gains for a threatened species (or prevent immediate losses) produce significantly higher benefits than activities that gradually achieve the same abundance gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The random parameter logit (RPL) model with uncorrelated coefficients is a restrictive version of the mixed logit model, but it is one of the most frequently used models for analysing stated choice data in environmental valuation. The body of applied literature using a more flexible version, the RPL model with correlated coefficients, has been noticeably growing in the last years, but it has still been used less frequently due to its computational complexity and non-trivial interpretation. The correlation matrix of the coefficients in this model captures not only the correlation due to a behavioural phenomenon but also the correlation caused by scale heterogeneity. These two effects cannot be identified empirically. Nevertheless, this paper proposes a simple procedure that enables an interpretation of some of the estimated correlations, which can help to disentangle the unobserved preference heterogeneity. The proposed procedure consists of two simple steps. Firstly, the signs of the attributes corresponding to the utility coefficients that have a negative mean coefficient are reversed. Secondly, only negative correlations are interpreted. We propose a theoretical model accounting for correlations induced both by hypothetical behavioural phenomena and by scale heterogeneity and apply the proposed procedure to three typical cases of environmental valuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the effects of age and baseline health on the Value per Statistical Life (VSL) by reporting the results of a compensating wage differential for occupational fatality risk in France. We exploit Constances, a novel population-based cohort that combines respondents' full medical history, elicited using face-to-face interviews with physicians, with respondents' work history, extracted from administrative records. Focusing on blue-collar males, aged between 20 and 59 years of age, we find an average VSL estimate of at least 6.5 million euros. Our results suggest that VSL decreases with age and with better baseline health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]