Conference Agenda

We analyze the private provision of a public good in a setting where production relies on experience-enhanced learning by doing. In the East Kolkata Wetlands, cooperatives treat municipal sewage as a joint product of sewage-fed aquaculture. We model this system in which the productivity of senior members depends on the experience they accumulated as juniors, in the presence of the seniors' experience at that time. This creates a feedback loop where a negative shock to returns that drives juniors out of the cooperative lowers the stock of system-specific experience, reducing future capacity to treat sewage. We characterize the steady-state and dynamic labor responses under three cooperative objectives: profit maximization, wage maximization with differentiated wages, and wage maximization with equal wages. We find that while profit-maximization achieves static efficiency, wage-maximizing objectives, particularly those that impose equal wages across cohorts, act as a retention mechanism during downturns.

We study the management of natural resources that are weakly connected and exhibit tipping behaviour in their dynamics. We obtain approximate feedback optimal management rules for networks of weakly connected natural resource systems by developing the value function with respect to the interaction strength. The method is

general and rigorous, and allows to treat the effects of multiple interactions without

suffering from the curse of dimensionality. We show that a system consisting of multiple interacting natural resource systems can be managed close to optimally if the

interactions between the systems are weak. This is the case even if the system consists

of many connected subsystems. Moreover, if the interaction strengths themselves can

be controlled, managers can improve the outcome by only allowing beneficial interactions, and shutting down disadvantageous ones. This brings new options for the management of connected resources with tipping points.

Feedback loops between income dynamics and disease prevalence affect livelihoods for many communities around the world by reinforcing conditions that can foster poverty traps. We develop a coupled natural-human system model of a local economy integrated with ecological and disease dynamics, which we use to investigate the direct and ancillary consequences of targeted policy interventions in a rural, developing-country setting where household livelihoods are deeply linked to health and the environment. Our model characterizes relationships between labor allocation, ecological sustainability, and disease transmission that are common across a wide range of settings. Our results demonstrate that targeted policy interventions can produce both intuitive and counterintuitive consequences. Productivity-enhancing interventions can produce economic, ecological, and public health benefits, while interventions that target ecological objectives may inadvertently prop up conditions that underlie disease-based poverty traps. We also consider how market structure may exacerbate or mitigate the trade-offs resulting from stand-alone and concurrently implemented policy interventions.

Climate change poses substantial threats capable of triggering a drop in the renewability and quality of natural resources. In this paper, we extend standard stock-recruitment models to examine how the risk of this environmental event affects the tragedy of the commons associated with decentralized harvest decisions made by players exploiting a common pool renewable resource. We use general functional forms and allow for endogenous or exogenous hazard rates. Our analysis indicates that anticipating this environmental event critically affects harvest incentives. For instance, linear strategies may not hold in equilibrium when the hazard is stock dependent. The representative player can increase extraction today in response to a higher risk of decreased both resource renewability and quality. Even when environmental risk induces conservation, we find conditions under which the tragedy of the commons is mitigated. Calibrating our model to the Baltic Cod fishery, we find that players' strategic responses to the estimated endogenous regime shift risk may reverse the tragedy of the commons.