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Designers and funders of payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs have long worried that payments flow to landholders who would have conserved forests even without the program, undermining the environmental benefits ("additionality") and cost-effectiveness of PES. If landholders self-select into PES programs based on how much conservation they were going to undertake anyway, then those who were planning to conserve should always enroll. This paper discusses the less-appreciated fact that enrollment is often based on other factors too. The hassle of signing up or financial costs of enrollment (e.g., purchasing seedlings) can affect who participates in a PES program. These enrollment costs reduce overall take-up, and, importantly, they can also influence the composition of landholders who select into the program-and thereby the program's environmental benefits per enrollee. Enrollment costs can increase a program's benefits per enrollee if they are systematically higher for (and thus deter enrollment by) landholders who would have conserved anyway. Alternatively, enrollment costs can dampen per-enrollee benefits if their correlation with status-quo conservation is in the opposite direction. We illustrate these points with evidence from two studies of randomized trials of PES programs aimed at increasing forest cover in Uganda and Malawi. We also discuss how in other sectors, such as social welfare, policy designers have purposefully adjusted the costs of program enrollment to influence the composition of participants and improve cost-effectiveness. We propose that these ideas for targeting could be incorporated into the design of PES programs.

This paper studies the contribution of sulfa drugs, a groundbreakingmedical innovation in the 1930s, to declines in US mortality. Forseveral infectious diseases, sulfa drugs represented the first effectivetreatment. Using time-series and difference-in-differences methods,we find that sulfa drugs led to a 24 to 36 percent decline in maternalmortality, 17 to 32 percent decline in pneumonia mortality, and 52to 65 percent decline in scarlet fever mortality between 1937 and1943. Altogether, sulfa drugs reduced mortality by 2 to 3 percent andincreased life expectancy by 0.4 to 0.7 years. We also find that sulfadrugs benefited whites more than blacks. (JEL I12, L65, N32, N72)

Previous research suggests that medical advances played a negligible role in the large decline in mortality rates during the first half of the twentieth century. This paper, in contrast, presents evidence that sulfa drugs―the first pharmaceuticals effective at treating infectious diseases― were an important cause of U.S. mortality declines after their discovery in the 1930s. Using timeseries and difference-in-difference methods (with infectious diseases unaffected by sulfa drugs as a comparison group), we present evidence on the effects of sulfa drugs on mortality. We find that sulfa drugs led to a 25% decline in maternal mortality, a 13% decline in pneumonia and influenza mortality, and a 52% decline in scarlet fever mortality between 1937 and 1943. Sulfa drugs also widened racial disparities in mortality, suggesting that new medical technology diffuses more rapidly among whites than blacks and consistent with the hypothesis that innovation initially increases inequality across population subgroups.

Air quality was extremely poor in Indonesia in late 1997 due to smoke from massive wildfires. This paper examines the impact this episode of air pollution (particulate matter) had on infant and fetal mortality. Deaths are inferred from “missing children” in the 2000 Indonesian Census, analyzing subdistrict-year-month birth cohorts and exploiting the sharp timing and spatial patterns of the pollution. Exposure to pollution during the last trimester in utero is found to have a large effect on survival. The fire-induced pollution caused a 1.0% decrease in cohort size, or over 16,400 missing children across Indonesia for the five-month period of high exposure. In addition, pollution has much larger mortality effects in poorer areas. The results suggest that environmental damage that occurs alongside economic development has large and regressive health costs.

In May 2001 Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party and tipped control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats. This paper uses the surprise event to demonstrate what I term the "Jeffords effect": changes in the political landscape have large effects on the market value of firms. I use a firm’s soft money donations to the national parties as the measure of how the firm aligns itself politically. In this event study of large public firms, a firm lost 0.8% of market capitalization the week of Jeffords’ switch for every $250,000 it gave to the Republicans in the previous election cycle. Based on the point estimates, the stock price gain associated with Democratic donations is smaller than the loss associated with Republican donations, but the estimates are consistent with the coefficients being equal and opposite. The results withstand several robustness checks, and the effects appear to persist long after the event. The relationship between soft money and stock returns may or may not be causal: Soft money could be a proxy for how well each party’s policies suit a firm, or donations might affect how much help politicians give to a firm.

Many analysts argue that trade sanctions are ineffective because they generate incentives for evasion. Others object to them as hurting the population of the target country as much as its leaders. We argue that loan sanctions unlike trade sanctions may be self-enforcing, and that they help the population by protecting it from being saddled with “odious debt” run up by dictators to finance looting or repression. In particular, governments could impose sanctions by instituting legal changes that prevent seizure of a country’s assets for non-repayment of debt, if the debt was incurred after the sanction was imposed. This would reduce creditors’ incentive to extend loans to sanctioned regimes. However, decisions on whether assets can be seized to enforce debt repayment would be subject to bias if they were made ex post and the deciding body asymmetrically valued the welfare of debtor countries and their creditors. Restricting such decisions to cover only future lending would help avoid this time-consistency problem.

In a model of an agrarian economy in which individuals vary in landownership, workers supply labor more inelastically the poorer they are and the less easily they can borrow, save, or migrate in response to productivity shocks. Consequently, underdeveloped and isolated areas experience more wage volatility. This equilibrium e�ect hurts the poor. But for landowners, inelastic labor supply is a form of insurance. One ramification is that reducing the cost of borrowing and saving can actually hurt a landowner. For a given level of income volatility, he can smooth consumption better; but his income becomes more volatile due to changes in the equilibrium wage. Data on the agricultural wage in 257 districts in India for 1956-87 are consistent with the model. In districts with better banking or access to other areas (e.g., higher road density), the agricultural wage is less influenced by fluctuations in crop yield, instrumented with rainfall variation. In sum, the poor are vulnerable to productivity risk; I show that underdevelopment exacerbates this risk.

This paper examines how the price of home heating affects mortality in the United States. Exposure to cold is one reason that mortality peaks in winter, and a higher heating price increases exposure to cold by reducing heating use. Our empirical approach combines spatial variation in the energy source used for home heating and temporal variation in the national prices of natural gas and electricity. We find that a lower heating price reduces winter mortality, driven mostly by cardiovascular and respiratory causes. Our estimates imply that the 42% drop in the natural gas price in the late 2000s, mostly driven by the shale gas boom, averted 12,500 deaths per year in the United States. The effect appears to be especially large in high-poverty communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]