Conference Agenda

Policymakers often seek to reduce resource consumption but face constraints that preclude the use of prices or other first-best instruments. This paper studies the effectiveness and design of an alternative approach: payments for voluntary conservation. We offered payments for reduced groundwater use among farmers in Gujarat, India in a randomized controlled trial. Price incentives work: The program reduced irrigation time by 22 percent. Conservation payments are a practical policy tool in this setting: The program saved energy at a per-unit cost comparable to the electric utility’s supply costs. Contract design greatly affects cost-effectiveness: More stringent benchmark values (against which conservation is measured and rewarded) halved the average cost of conservation.

Energy and water utilities need financial resources to maintain existing infrastructure, increase in capacity to meet growing demand, meet environmental regulations, and invest in climate resilience. Considerable attention has been paid to innovative means of financing the transition to universal access to water and sanitation services and the global transition to a clean energy future. This paper examines the foundation of utility finance – customer bill payment. We partner with Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company to test the impact of an unconditional arrears forgiveness program on customer bill payment behavior. To our knowledge, this is the first study to experimentally test the impact of an arrears management program. We find that providing customers unconditional arrears forgiveness was not effective at improving customer bill payment and, in fact, made bill payment worse in the short run. Customers in our treatment group were less likely to make a payment towards their bill, less likely to pay their full bill on time, and accumulated more arrears over the six months following our intervention than untreated households. Our results suggest that one-off debt amnesty may inadvertently reduce compliance, and that utilities should consider conditional or alternative assistance measures.

Fuel subsidies to the fishing industry are widely considered to be one of the leading drivers of overfishing, which has prompted calls for a global reform. However, rigorous empirical evidence quantifying the behavioral and production responses to fuel subsidies remains limited. We address this gap by analyzing 14 years of high-resolution data on fisher-level fuel subsidy allocations, fishing activity, and production in Mexico’s shrimp trawl fleet. Leveraging year-to-year variation in Mexico’s subsidy policy, we find that receiving a fuel subsidy increases fishing effort by 40.7%, with similar responses for fished area and landed catch. These responses scale with the size of the subsidy: a 1% increase in the subsidy received raises fishing effort, area fished, and landings by 0.14% to 0.20%. Mexico's abrupt subsidy elimination in 2020 reduced fishing pressure through two channels: a 30% reduction in fleet size as marginal economic units exited, and lower fishing time among the economic units that remained. Together, these results identify fuel subsidies as a major driver of fishing pressure: roughly 37% of fishing effort and two-thirds of landings in this fleet are attributable to subsidies, supporting ongoing global efforts to eliminate them.

Using an original survey of 12,000 respondents representative of eleven high-income countries (the United States, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and seven European countries), I examine public support for international redistribution and climate policies, as well as its sensitivity to key policy features such as the size of transfers and country coverage. Although global inequality is not a salient concern, it is perceived as a significant injustice. There is majority acceptance in every country for nearly all global policies tested, including those that would redistribute 5 percent of global income or entail personal costs for respondents. An information treatment shows that support for global policies causally increases among respondents who perceive them as likely; an effect opposite to warm glow. Support for international policies decreases only slightly as country coverage shrinks. Overall, the results reinforce previous findings and suggest that a broad coalition of countries could feasibly advance sustainable development.