Upcoming events

Ed Rubin - Perinatal Health Effects of Herbicides: Glyphosate and the Roll-out of GM Crops (virtual seminar)

Abstract: The advent of herbicide-tolerant genetically modified (GM) crops spurred rapid and widespread use of the herbicide glyphosate. In the two decades following GM seeds' introduction, the volume of glyphosate applied in US agriculture increased by more than 750%. Despite its breadth and scale, both science and policy remain unresolved regarding the effects of glyphosate on human health. We identify the causal effect of glyphosate exposure on perinatal health by combining (1) county-level variation in glyphosate use driven by (2) the timing of the GM technology and (3) differential geographic suitability for GM crops. Our results suggest glyphosate significantly reduced average birthweight and gestational length. While we find effects throughout the birthweight distribution, low-weight births experienced the largest reductions: the effect for births in the lowest quintile is 75 times larger than that of the highest quintile. Together, these estimates suggest that glyphosate exposure caused previously undocumented and unequal health costs for rural US communities over the last 20 years.

Francois Libois - Community Forest Management: Unveiling the Success Story of Nepal (virtual seminar)

Abstract: Nepal has implemented one of the most ambitious and comprehensive program of forest management decentralization in the world since 1993. The program has been widely recognized as a successful example of participatory natural resource management. We first use quasi-experimental methods to quantify the net increase in tree cover resulting from the pro- gram and how this change evolved over time in the Hills and Mountains of Nepal. We then assess the relative importance of forest density relative to forested area in contributing to these changes. We finally discuss some of the mechanisms driving forest restoration, emphasizing the role community forestry also played in reducing immediate demand pressures by altering energy choices.

Nathan W. Chan - On generosity in public good and charitable dictator games (virtual seminar)

Abstract: We examine the relationship between generosity in charitable dictator games (CDGs) and public good games (PGGs). We construct a novel generalized game that subsumes both as special cases and present experimental subjects with different blends of CDG and PGG tasks. Generosity in the CDG and PGG are only weakly correlated, in spite of close experimental control on confounding factors. We furthermore demonstrate how underlying preferences shape these behaviors, revealing important distinctions between preferences for charity and public good provision. Our findings have implications for the generalizability of existing experimental results that rely upon these games.

Allan Beltran Hernandez - After the Flood: Housing Market Liquidity and House Prices - Co-authors: Karlygash Kuralbayeva (KCL) and Eileen Tipoe (QMU) 

Dr Allan Beltran is an environmental economist with research interests on environmental valuation, the economics of climate change and climate policy. His research combines the use of econometric analysis and geographical data to improve our understanding of the economic costs and benefits of climate change, as well as the effects of policies designed to limit its impact.

This presentation investigated the effect of floods on housing liquidity (the ability to transact housing units) and prices in England and Wales from 2010-2018. To do this, we combine data on the universe of residential property transactions from the Land Registry, property listings on Zoopla, and historical flood records from the Environment Agency. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach focused on postcodes that narrowly missed flooding (“near-miss”), we find that the average time on the market (TOM) for properties exposed to inland flooding increases by 9.6%, equivalent to an additional 27 days on the market. This delay is accompanied by a 2.4% decline in house prices. Exploring heterogeneity by economic deprivation of postcode areas, we find that inland near-miss properties in least deprived areas lose more liquidity (28 days) but maintain prices, whereas owners of properties in most deprived areas lose on both price (2.4%) and liquidity (23 days). Our analysis of the mechanisms driving these contrasting results based on evidence from bidding wars and listing density suggests that the decrease in liquidity in high deprivation areas is due to an increase in listed properties (supply shock), whereas the impacts in high deprivation areas results from both a decrease in the number of buyers (demand shock) and an increase in seller’s urgency to sell (higher holding costs). In coastal areas, we do not observe significant impacts on time on the market or price. These findings show evidence that floods contribute to widening social disparities and emphasise the importance of flood protection investments in deprived areas to prevent exacerbating inequality.

Alex Pfaff - Comparing Protection Types in The Peruvian Amazon: Multiple-Use Protected Areas Did No Worse for Forests

Alex Pfaff is a Professor of Public Policy, Economics and the Environment at Duke University. He studies how economic development affects and is affected by natural resources and the environment. His focus is the design of conservation and development policies to affect individuals’ and groups’ choices — including information provision and use — which, in turn, affect the land, water, and air as well as peoples’ economic outcomes and environmental exposures.

This presentation explored how protected areas (PAs), which restrict economic activities, are the leading land and marine policy for ecosystem conservation. Most contexts feature different types of protection that vary in their stringency of management. Using spatially detailed panel data for 1986-2018, we estimate PAs’ impacts upon forests in the Peruvian Amazon. Which type of protection has greater impacts on the forest is ambiguous, theoretically, given potential for significant differences by type in siting and enforcement. We find that the less strict multiple-use PAs, that allow local livelihoods, do no worse for forests than strict PAs: each PA type holds off small loss spikes seen in unprotected forests; and multiple[1]use, if anything, do a bit better. This adds to evidence on the coexistence of private activities with conservation objectives.

Corbett Grainger  - The Impact of Air Pollution on Labor Supply in China (with M. Fa.n) (link to presentation)

Corbett is an Associate Professor in the Ag & Applied Economics Department at University of Wisconsin. His research focuses on understanding the distributional effects of regulations, property rights and institutions as well as the political economy of environmental and natural resource policy. Applications include ambient air pollution, climate change and rights-based management of marine fisheries. His research has appeared in many of the top economics journals, including AEA Papers & Proceedings, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. 

Thomas Sterner -  Some Like it Hot (link to presentation)

Thomas is a Professor at the University of Gothenburg where he has built a large Environmental Economics Unit. Thomas is a former president of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (2008-9), and was employed 2012-3, as the Chief Economist at the Environmental Defence Fund. Thomas was also a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC AR5 2010-2015 and sits on the council which will evaluate the 10bn€ French Green Bond program – the world’s largest such scheme. His academic publications have appeared in top journals including Nature, Science, and Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

Vic Adamowicz - Chronic Wasting Disease: Economic Analysis of a Complex Wildlife Disease (link to presentation)

Vic is a Professor in Environmental Economics and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Alberta (Canada). His research focuses on integrating the environment into economic analysis, environmental valuation, consumer choice, and market based instruments for environmental conservation. Vic has published more than 150 refereed journal articles. His work, which has been cited more than 20,000 times, has been published in several top economic and science journals, including Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. During his career, Vic has also served as President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics.

This presentation was based on research conducted by a team of social scientists centered at the University of Alberta including Ellen Goddard, Marty Luckert, Brenda Parlee, Lusi Xie, John Pattison-Williams, Geoff Durocher, Merlin Uwalaka,  as well as colleagues Maik Kecinski (U Delaware), Pat Lloyd-Smith (U Sasakatchewan) and Margo Pybus and Anne Hubbs (Alberta Environment and Parks). This research has been supported by the Alberta Prion Research Institute, the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, Genome Alberta and Genome Canada.

Ben Groom - REDD+ as an area based policy: Evidence from the 2011 Indonesian Moratorium on Palm Oil, Logging and Timber Concessions - Lorenzo Sileci, Charles Palmer and Ben Groom, 2020 (link to presentation) 

Ben is the Dragon Capital Chair in Biodiversity Economics, sitting in the LEEP Institute at the University of Exeter and joined in July 2020. Prior to this he was a Professor at the London School of Economics. His research focusses primarily along two related strands; one of how to distribute resources across individuals within society (both now and in the future), and the other on the economics of biodiversity. As such, he founded and continues to run the BioEcon network. His research has appeared in many top journals including: The American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, The Economic Journal and Science.

Brendan Fisher - Behavioral Science and Conservation: can behavioral economics deliver on sustainability goals

Brendan is a Professor at the University of Vermont. His research focusses on the valuation of ecosystem services, and the role of behavioural economics in shifting people towards pro-environmental behaviours. His work has appeared in many of the top journals, including Nature, Nature Climate Change and Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. (link to presentation)

Human behavior has, and continues to, greatly impact our planet, and compromise the integrity of our climate and ecological systems. A suite of traditional approaches are in place to try to mitigate the impacts of individual or collective decisions on biodiversity and ecosystems, or to incentivize behaviors for better outcomes. Such approaches rely on an understanding of behavior as the result of rational decisions, albeit by sometimes ill-informed agents. These include taxes, fines, fees, payments, education, quotas, minimum standards and so on. Understanding the impacts of these approaches has largely been the role of economics and policy evaluation. Yet, increasingly we understand human behavior to be the result of a more complex decision-making process than merely a benefit-cost analysis, and therefore insights from behavioral science have delivered another set of potential approaches for nudging human decisions and resultant behavior. Such approaches are believed to often be cheaper to deliver and more palatable to those affected (e.g. better than taxes). Here we review some of the evidence regarding behavioral science-inspired approaches to mitigating the effects of large-impact, large-externality behaviors, highlight some successes of such approaches, expose some gaps in our evidence base, and then offer a framework for thinking more broadly than typical approaches of incentivizing individual producers and consumers. While the evidence of behavioral science-inspired approaches to mitigating human impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems is scant, the scope for such approaches to work is large, and largely untested.

Gretchen Daily -  Demonstration to Transformation:  Taking Natural Capital Approaches to Scale 

Gretchen is the Bing Professor of Environmental Science at Stanford University, as well as the Director of both the Center for Conservation Biology and the Natural Capital Project. Her research primarily focuses on how resources can be better managed for both biodiversity and people, and particularly on quantifying the flows or ecosystem services and stocks of natural capital across the landscape. There are few recognitions Gretchen has not been honoured with: she is a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the 2020 Tyler Prize Laureate, and a member of the LEEP Advisory Board. Her work has been published in all of the top journals including Nature, Science, and Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. (link to presentation)

Kelsey Jack - Harvesting the rain: The adoption of environmental technologies in the Sahel 

Kelsey Jack is an Assistant Professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. Her research is at the intersection of environmental and development economics, with a focus on how individuals, households, and communities decide to use natural resources and provide public goods. Kelsey’s research uses field experiments to test theory and new policy innovations. It has appeared in many of the top economic and scientific journals, including: The American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, and Review of Economics and Statistics.  If you were unable to attend this presentation or want to find out more about Kelsey's research please email LEEP@exeter.ac.uk where you will be provided with a password to view this talk.

Jayson Lusk -   A Basket-Based Choice Experiment 

Prof. Jayson Lusk currently serves as Distinguished Professor and Head of the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University. He’s a food and agricultural economist who studies what we eat and why we eat it. Since 2000, he has published more than 240 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals on a wide assortment of topics ranging from the economics of animal welfare to consumer preferences for genetically modified food to the impacts of new technologies and policies on livestock and meat markets to analyzing the merits of new survey and experimental approaches eliciting consumer preferences. In 2011, Prof. Lusk served as a visiting researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research and worked on a research fellowship awarded by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. He’s served on the editorial councils of eight academic journals including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Food Policy and consulted for various non-profits, government agencies, and agribusinesses.  He has also been elected to and served on the executive committees of the three largest U.S. agricultural economics associations. He is a fellow and past president of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.  

Despite their popularity and wide use, a key drawback of choice experiments is that they rely on consumers making a single discrete choice. However, consumers routinely select multiple food items simultaneously when shopping. This study introduces a novel approach – a basket-based choice experiment – where consumers select their preferred food item or combination of food items. Our basket-based choice experiment includes 21 possible foods that can be used to construct over 2 million possible baskets. Our results show that when given the opportunity, consumers select multiple items for their basket, most commonly three or four items. A composite conditional likelihood function approach is used to reduce the computational burden associated with modeling the choice of over 2 million possible baskets, and estimates are utilized in a multivariate logit (MVL) model to calculate the probability of bundle selection and individual food price elasticities. Unlike typical choice experiments utilizing variants of the multinomial logit model, which forces products to be demand substitutes, our basket-based approach is able to capture a rich set of substitution and complementary patterns, and we find that most of the 21 food items studied are demand complements.

Antonio Bento – A Unifying Approach to Measuring Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation (Antonio M. Bento, Noah Miller, Mehreen Mookerjee, Edson Severnini)

Antonio Bento is currently a Professor at the Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics at the University of Southern California. Antonio is an applied microeconomist with a research program in the areas of environmental, energy, urban, and public economics. Most of his work consists of theoretical and empirical assessments of major public policy issues, and his scholarly interests range widely both in topics and methods, but with a recent focus on policies related to energy provision and consumption. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the Journal of Urban Economics, the Energy Journal and other scholarly journals and books.

Mar Reguant - The Distributional Implications of Real-Time Pricing (joint work with Jingyuan Wang, Natalia Fabra, and Michael Cahana)

Mar is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research focusses on energy economics, and particularly the impact of market institutions – often targeting pro-environmental changes – on industry outcomes. Her work has published in several top journals including The AER, REStud, JPE, EER and JAERE.

While the benefits of Real-Time Pricing (RTP) of electricity are well known, less is known about their distributional impacts. In this paper, we examine the distributional impacts of RTP by leveraging on a country-wide field experiment: starting in 2015, RTP has become the default option for most Spanish households. Access to hourly consumption data during more than a year for over 4M households allows us to compute the bill impacts of the switch from flat rates to RTP. By examining the households' sociodemographic characteristics, we document who wins and who loses from RTP. We propose a method to infer consumers' unobserved income combining highly granular data with information of the distribution of income at the zip code level. Our results suggest that the distributional impacts of RTP were quite small and, if anything, slightly progressive.

Our research is closely aligned with the stated goals of COP26 to secure net zero by the middle of the century and to adapt and protect those communities and natural habitats that are already suffering the catastrophic consequences of climate change. 

LEEP academics will be speaking at the following events:

Bringing climate, biodiversity and other ecosystem services into policy and economic decision making

3^rd November 2021
Ian Bateman
Presented at ‘Biodiversity, nature-based solutions, oceans: Climate Neutrality and Biodiversity - renewables assets, reporting standards and sustainable finance,
European Union Pavilion, COP26, Glasgow

A natural capital approach to decision making for future woodlands

4^th November 2021
Ian Bateman and Brett Day
Talk delivered from COP26 to Trees for the Future - Diversity and complexity for resilience and carbon storage, Association of Applied Biologists

When Science Meets Economics: The Right Tree in the Right Place for NetZeroPlus

6^th November 2021
Ian Bateman and Richard Betts

The workshop brings together the natural and physical science, economics and social science necessary to move from single focus analyses to the multi-dimensional policy necessary to meet 21^st Century challenges.

Delivering net zero requires that we change the way we use land. However, policy disasters from the past show us that focussing on a single issue, even an important one such as food production, can generate massive negative side-effects. Conversely, recognising these side-effects, which can also be positive, and bringing them into decision making can allow us to produce the evidence led policies essential for delivering both net zero and wider environmental and economic benefits. Land use change, such as planting trees for carbon storage, will also affect food production, biodiversity, water quality, flood risk, human engagement with the environment and multiple other benefits. 

DOWNLOAD FULL PROGRAMME HERE - LEEPin2019 programme

Overview

LEEP’s inaugural conference, held on Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th June 2019 at the University of Exeter, showcased the very best research at the cutting edge of environmental and resource economics, spread over two days in the run-up to the EAERE annual conference in Manchester. The conference featured plenary sessions from a range of high profile speakers, as well as contributed talks and posters, on a range of topics, using a broad suite of methods.

This conference was organised with the support of EAERE, the Royal Economic Society, University of Exeter Business School and Professor Janice Kay CBE (Provost, University of Exeter).

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‌Keynote speakers included:

• Stephen Polasky, University of Minnesota, USA
• Catherine Kling, Iowa State University, USA
• Paul Ferraro, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Georgina Mace, University College London, UK
• Ian Bateman, University of Exeter, UK
• Graham Loomes, University of Warwick, UK
• Brett Day, University of Exeter, UK
• Christian Vossler, University of Tennessee, USA
• Nicholas Hanley, University of Glasgow, UK
• Roger Von Haefen, North Carolina State University, USA 
• Richard Carson, University of California, USA

Papers covered a range of topics, including:

• Mechanism design and Payments for Ecosystem Services
• Resource management
• Applied behavioural economics
• Non-market valuation
• Spatial and temporal issues, and integrated modelling approaches
• Economic insights to improve Government policy
• Applications of a range of methods – including field and laboratory experiments, RCTs and applied econometrics – are encouraged

Through generous sponsorship from EAERE, The Royal Economic Society, University of Exeter Business School and Professor Janice Kay CBE (Provost, University of Exeter), we were able to ensure that there was no conference fee.

Presentations

Presentations that have been made for download by speakers:

Contact us - LEEP@exeter.ac.uk 

Twitter - @LEEPin2019