We use the 1998 expansion of the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) that required newly regu- lated industry sectors to report facility releases to obtain exogenous changes in a facility’s relative ranking within a state to test whether being labeled a “Top 10” worst polluter affects a...[more]

Preanalysis plans (PAPs) have become an important tool for limiting false discoveries in field experiments. We evaluate the properties of an alternate approach which splits the data into two samples: An exploratory sample and a confirmation sample. When hypotheses are homogeneous, we describe an...[more]

Lack of primary health care use can increase preventable maternal and child deaths in low-income countries. Community health workers can be an alternative supply to deficient formal healthcare provision among underserved poor populations, but the empirical evidence on their impact on health...[more]

Empirical studies advocating the temporal variability of risk attitudes suggest that adverse covariate shocks significantly alter risk attitudes over time, but there is no consensus on the direction. In this paper, we investigate whether risk aversion increases or decreases in response to shocks....[more]

This paper aims to understand the rationale behind farmers’ decisions about agricultural technology adoption. I construct a farmer’s decision-making model which takes into account both the expected value and the variance of a farmer’s profit, and within it I build a farmer's production...[more]

Observed levels of adaptation to climate change among rural households remain low and poorly understood. This is troublesome because climate change is predicted to increase the incidence and severity of temperature and precipitation shocks affecting agricultural production. To address this...[more]

We explore the career implications of part-time work by focusing on employers’ expectations of employees’ productivity. Using personnel records from three large companies in the Netherlands, we document a sizable part-time gap, but no overtime premium, in the subjective performance ratings...[more]

Do anti-deforestation policies increase productivity and increase investment? If so, do they lead to a decrease in clearing? We study these questions in the context of cattle production in the Brazilian Amazon and consider two policies: the Priority Municipalities List, an increase in the intensity...[more]

We examine the coping mechanisms of fishermen to a large-scale environmental disaster in 2016, when toxic industrial waste contaminated the marine ecosystem of Vietnam's central coast. Combining labor force surveys with a novel satellite data of boat detection, we find significant negative effects...[more]

Raising smallholder agricultural productivity has the potential to boost GDP and to reduce rural poverty, but the evidence on how to best achieve productivity gains remains mixed. Technologies exist that can increase smallholder yields and profits, but researchers and practitioners grapple with how...[more]

To investigate how alcohol and its correlates affect socio-economic and health outcomes by estimating the demand for problem drinking, we use the 2016 waves of three annually conducted national population surveys in this research: the Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance (BRFSS), the National Survey...[more]

This paper analyzes the impact of Clean Water Act (CWA) regulations on the farm management practices of U.S. dairy concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). We employ a system-of-equations approach to examine how dairy farmers adjust their management practices in response to the policy...[more]

In this paper I investigate whether state regulators in the US consider environmental benefits to neighboring states when prioritizing abandoned coal mines for reclamation. I approach this question in two steps. First, I examine the spatial magnitude of the downstream water quality improvements...[more]

In the agriculture sector, a large vector of productivity growth has been improvements in biological innovations, specifically improvements in genetics (Olmstead and Rhode 2008). The dairy sector in the US is an interesting case study for such growth, which has been achieved by innovations in the...[more]

The federal crop insurance program is a major risk management program for U.S. farmers to manage production risks, but federal spending for the premium subsidy has been much debated. This study empirically estimates county-level demand for the two primary crop insurance policies – yield and...[more]

We join a growing body of literature in behavioral economics suggesting that the structure of language exerts an influence on people’s thoughts and decisions. We test if dropping the first-person pronoun “I” affects social preferences in a dictator game-like setting. We conduct an online...[more]

This paper examines a widespread and under-studied source of environmental harm to children's early cognition, and illustrates how parental investments in child development respond to these external threats. Motivated by a growing empirical literature showing causal links between historic or...[more]