Although developing countries have established scores of new protected areas over the past three decades, they often amount to little more than “paper parks” that are chronically short of the…

We estimate the effect of hydro-meteorological emergencies on internal migration in Costa Rica during 1995–2000. We find that, on average, emergencies significantly increase average migration. However…

Programs of payments for ecosystem services are policy instruments that compensate those who provide those services for the costs they incur. One of the most attractive characteristics of this type of…

According to advocates, eco-certification can stem environmental damages from tourism in developing countries. Yet we know little about tourism operators’ economic incentives to get certified. To help…

The number of protected areas around the world has significantly increased. However, the effects of this policy on the wellbeing of local households are still under debate. Using pre-treatment…

We estimate local effects of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) programs on poverty in Costa Rica between 2007 and 2009. Using household surveys and spatial geographic data, we are able to…

For Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, we find that protection types with differences in governance, including different constraints on local economic development, also differ in their locations. Taking…

We estimate the effect of hydro-meteorological emergencies on internal migration in Costa Rica between 1995 and 2000. Nationwide, we find that an increase of one emergency in a canton significantly…

Incentives conditioned on socially desired acts such as donating blood, departing conflict or mitigating climate change have increased in popularity. Many incentives are targeted, excluding some of…

A critical issue in the design of incentive mechanisms is the choice of whom to target. For forests, the leading schemes: [i] target locations with high ecosystem-service density; [ii] target…