This study investigates the impact of climate change adaptation on farm households’ downside risk exposure in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia. The analysis relies on a moment-based specification of the stochastic production function. We use an empirical strategy that accounts for the heterogeneity in the decision on whether to adapt or not, and for unobservable characteristics of farmers and their farm.

The introduction of a price on CO2 is expected to be more efficient than prescriptive regulation. It also instantiates substantial economic value. Initially, programs allocated this value to incumbent firms (grandfathering), but the growing movement toward auctioning or emissions fees makes carbon revenues into a payment for environmental services. This paper asks to whom should this payment accrue?

Voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated between environmental regulators and polluters are increasingly popular in developing countries. According to proponents, they can sidestep weak institutions and other pervasive barriers to conventional mandatory regulation in such countries. Yet little is known about the drivers of their use and their effectiveness in poor countries. The considerable literature on voluntary initiatives in industrialized countries, where both VAs and socioeconomic conditions differ, may not apply.

Uncertainty about the future is an important determinant of well-being, especially in developing countries where financial markets and other market failures result in ineffective insurance mechanisms. However, separating the effects of future uncertainty from realised events, and then measuring the impact of uncertainty on utility, presents a number of empirical challenges.

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 increases average migration rates from that canton, after controlling for several social, economic, climatic and demographic factors in both the canton of origin and destination.

The authors analyze the impact of different adaptation strategies on crop net revenues in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia and they estimate a multinomial endogenous switching regression model of climate change adaptation and crop net revenues and implement a counterfactual analysis.

The adoption and diffusion of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) has become an important issue in the development-policy agenda for sub-Saharan Africa, especially as a way to tackle land degradation, low agricultural productivity and poverty. However, the adoption rates of SAPs remain below expected levels.

All environmental policies involve costs of implementation and management that are distinct from pollution sources’ abatement costs. In practice, regulators and sources usually share these administrative costs. We examine theoretically an optimal policy consisting of an emissions tax and the distribution of administrative costs between the government and regulated sources of pollution. Our focus is on the optimal distribution of administrative costs between polluters and the government and the optimal level of the emissions tax in relation to marginal pollution damage.