Conference Agenda

The governance of natural resource wealth is a key factor in promoting strong institutions and economic development in resource-rich countries. In this paper, we explore how individuals’ engagement in local natural resource revenue (NRR) management can be enhanced and encouraged. We focus on Indonesia, which is a large gold and petroleum producer, among other natural resources, with local challenges such as underdevelopment of resource-rich areas and corruption. We run a randomized survey experiment among 807 local community members in an oil-rich district using videos with three information treatments that give citizens salient and easily understandable information on local NRR and additional motivation to use this information to engage in NRR management. Our outcomes include survey questions on stated behavior and citizen rights perception regarding NRR management, and two incentive-compatible measures. We find that providing easily understandable information increases respondents’ sense of the right to personally influence how NRR are used and the propensity to donate to an anti-corruption NGO. Our positive example treatment was able to increase respondents’ sense of their right to benefit from NRR and their right to influence NRR management, while our negative example treatment had no impact on our outcomes. We also explore intervening mechanisms and heterogeneous effects. Providing the population of resource-rich areas with easily understood information on NRR management that is relevant to the local context offers an encouraging avenue for combating NRR-related mismanagement and corruption.

Non-governmental and non-for-profit organizations in developing countries provide critical local and global public goods, supplementing and in some cases replacing the role of the state. Their role is particularly salient on environmental conservation, given the concentration of biodiversity in the global south, and the relative importance of other pressing needs in developing settings. Typically, these NGOs are highly dependant on attracting donations from developed nations to fund their operations. Partnering with an NGO provisioning environmental goods in a developing country, I carry out an online field experiment where analyzing the effect of loss and gain framings on donation behavior. I Utilize the extinction of a subspecies of the Galapagos Tortoise and the rediscovery of another previously believed-to-be extinct subspecies. Based on these two virtually indistinguishable species, I create two donation campaigns through an email appeal targeting donors from developed countries using a stratified randomization approach based on past in person and online donation behaviour and nationality. Conducting intention to treat and completers analyses, I find that an extinction loss frame leads to higher levels in both the probability of donation and donation amount than a rediscovery gain-framed text. Looking at heterogeneous treatment effects I find evidence that the gain frame increases the probability of donation for individuals who personally visited the NGO's exhibition in the Galapagos. Furthermore I explore the role of emotions, finding suggestive evidence of loss aversion having lower engagement and significantly lower self-assessed positive emotions than the gain campaign, albeit it delivering significantly more donations.

Organic farming, which eschews the use of synthetic inputs, has been proposed as a viable alternative to feed the world without degrading the environment. Despite the growing importance of organic farming, there is to date no large-scale credible evidence on whether organic farming achieves this feat. In this paper, we provide the first large-scale estimates of the causal impact of organic farming on biodiversity and on yields using the large increase in areas under organic farming that happened in France after 2000 as a result of a massive increase in subsidies. Leveraging a rich dataset containing more that 400,000 observations on water quality, 500,000 observations on bird abundance and 160,000 observations of farmers' practices, we find that yields decrease by 33% after conversion to organic farming, while bird abundance increases by 20%. We also find that organic farming decreases nitrate concentrations in rivers by 8%, but does not decrease phosphorus concentrations nor eutrophication and does not increase fish biodiversity. We interpret this result as suggesting that phosphorus is the limiting factor for eutrophication in French rivers.

What happens when beliefs about the proenvironmental impact of voluntary action are challenged? The voluntary carbon market offers a unique chance to explore this question. Recent criticisms about permanence uncertainties cast doubt on forestry offsets' ability to achieve long-term mitigation goals. Nonetheless, demand for offsets is dominated by forestry offsets – potentially due to misspecified beliefs on forestry offsets' permanence and long-term climate impacts as well as strong perceived co-benefits of trees.

In a framed-field experiment involving a representative German sample of 1,012 participants, I elicit prior beliefs regarding offsetting. Subsequently, I employ an incentivized offsetting choice presented in various information contexts to determine whether updating inaccurate beliefs prompts consumers to align their offsetting choices or whether this backfires, causing consumers to abstain from voluntary environmental action.

Results show that participants indeed overestimate forestry offsets' long-term climate impact but understand their co-benefits well. Providing information significantly influences offsetting behavior, of both participants holding correct and incorrect beliefs, shifting preferences from impermanent to permanent offset options. However, it does not lead participants to refrain from forestry offsets altogether, suggesting that not only the offsets long-term climate impact matters but also its co-benefits.