Previous studies of poverty in developing countries have to a great extent focused on the characteristics of the household head and used these as proxies for the underlying ability of the household to generate income. This paper uses five rounds of panel data to investigate the persistence of poverty in urban Ethiopia, with a particular focus on the role of intra-household heterogeneity in occupations.

Previous studies of poverty in developing countries have to a great extent focused on the characteristics of the household head and used these as proxies for the underlying ability of the household to generate income.

Unlike most studies of subjective well-being in developing countries, we use a fixed effects regression on three rounds of rich panel data to investigate the impact of relative standing on
life satisfaction of respondents in urban Ethiopia.

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.

We analyze the performance of the Federal Industrial Inspection Program operated by the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA) in Mexico City. We seek to answer three questions: What drives the inspections? What determines non-compliance? And what drives imposition of fines? We use firm-level data that identify certain characteristics of the firms, PROFEPA's inspections, compliance results and fines for all air polluting firms under the Program during the period January 2000–October 2008. We obtain three main results.

We use three rounds of a rich panel data set to investigate the determinants of household fuel choice and energy transition in urban Ethiopia. We observe that energy transition did not occur following economic growth in Ethiopia during the past decade.

Most studies suggest that environmental taxes are regressive, making them less attractive policy options. The general objective of this paper is to analyze and compare fossil fuel and food tax incidence in Ethiopia in different expenditure groups of households considering urban and rural parts of Ethiopia separately.

We study the effect of a household subsidy to induce the adoption of more efficient and less polluting wood combustion technologies. We compare, through numerical simulations, several subsidy designs with respect to the impact on aggregate emissions, costs, and cost-effectiveness indicators. Two variables that turn out to be important for the performance of a subsidy program are the remaining time that an existing equipment can be used and the access of the households to credit to fund the co-payment of the equipment.

Using individual travel diary data collected before and after the rail transit coverage expansion in urban Beijing, this paper estimates the impact of rail accessibility improvement on the usage of rail transit, automobiles, buses, walking, and bicycling, measured as percent distance traveled by each mode in an individual trip.

We study the cost effectiveness property of different control strategies for improving environmental quality. Our prospective analysis considers the application of Transferable Emissions Permit System (TEPS), Transferable Ambient Permit System (TAPS) and Standards (STD) applied on fix sources in Bogota-Colombia. A numerical simulation model allowed us to obtain costs of each regulatory system, which were compared with associated urban environmental quality. The results show that the most cost effective regulation for any environmental quality goal is TEPS, followed by TAPS and finally STD.