2017 Archives - Alex Pfaff

Upstream watershed condition predicts rural children’s health across 35 developing countries

Published December 24, 2017 by Alex Pfaff

Diego Herrera, Alicia Ellis, Brendan Fisher, Christopher D. Golden, Kiersten Johnson, Mark Mulligan, Alexander Pfaff, Timothy Treuer, Taylor H. Ricketts

Nature Communications 8:811 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00775-2

Diarrheal disease (DD) due to contaminated water is a major cause of child mortality globally. Forests and wetlands can provide ecosystem services that help maintain water quality. To understand the connections between land cover and childhood DD, we compiled a database of 293,362 children in 35 countries with information on health, socioeconomic factors, climate, and watershed condition. Using hierarchical models, here we find that higher upstream tree cover is associated with lower probability of DD downstream. This effect is significant for rural households but not for urban households, suggesting differing dependence on watershed conditions. In rural areas, the effect of a 30% increase in upstream tree cover is similar to the effect of improved sanitation, but smaller than the effect of improved water source, wealth or education. We conclude that maintaining natural capital within watersheds can be an important public health investment, especially for populations with low levels of built capital.

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Increasing the Impact of Collective Incentives in Payments for Ecosystem Services

Published November 24, 2017 by Alex Pfaff

David A. Kaczan, Alexander Pfaff, Luz A. Rodriguez, Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2017.06.007

Collective payments for ecosystem services (PES )programs make payments to groups, conditional on specified aggregate land-management outcomes.Such collective contracting may be well suited to settings with communal land tenure or decision-making. Given that collective contracting does not require costly individual-level information on outcomes, it may also facilitate conditioning on additionality (i.e., conditioning payments upon clearly improved outcomes relative to baseline). Yet collective contracting often suffers from free-riding, which undermines group outcomes and may be exacerbated or ameliorated by PES designs. We study impacts of conditioning on additionality within a number of collective PES
designs. We use a framed field-laboratory experiment with participants from a new PES program in Mexico. Because social interactions are critical within collective processes, we assess the impacts from conditioning on additionality given: (1) group participation in contract design, and (2) a group coordination mechanism. Conditioning on above-baseline outcomes raised contributions, particularly among initially lower contributors. Group participation in contract design increased impact, as did the coordination mechanism.

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Spillovers from Targeting of Incentives: exploring responses to being excluded

Published October 2, 2017 by Alex Pfaff

Francisco Alpizar, Anna Norden, Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino

Journal of Economic Psychology 59:87-98 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2017.02.007

A growing set of policies involve transfers conditioned upon socially desired actions, such as attending school or conserving forest. However, given a desire to maximize the impact of limited funds by avoiding transfers that do not change behavior, typically some potential recipients are excluded on the basis of their characteristics, their actions or at random. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to study the behavior of individuals excluded on different bases from a new incentive that encourages real monetary donations to a public environmental conservation program. We show that the donations from the individuals who were excluded based on prior high contributions fell significantly. Yet the rationale used for exclusion mattered, in that none of the other selection criteria used as the basis for exclusion resulted in negative effects on contributions.

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Reduction in exposure to arsenic from drinking well-water in Bangladesh limited by insufficient testing and awareness

Published September 6, 2017 by Alex Pfaff

Alexander Pfaff, Amy Schoenfeld, Kazi Matin Ahmed, Alexander van Geen

Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 07.2 doi: 10.2166/washdev.2017.136

This study considers potential policy responses to the still very high levels of exposure to arsenic (As) caused by drinking water from shallow tubewells in rural Bangladesh. It examines a survey of 4,109 households in 76 villages of Araihazar upazila conducted two years after a national testing campaign swept through the area. The area is adjacent to the region where a long-term study was initiated in 2000 and where households are periodically reminded of health risks associated with well-water elevated in As. Results confirm that testing spurs switching away from unsafe wells, although the 27% fraction who switched was only about half of that in the long-term study area. By village, the fraction of households that switched varied with the availability of safe wells and the distance from the long-term study area. Lacking follow-up testing, two years only after the campaign 21% of households did not know the status of their well and 21% of households with an unsafe well that switched did so to an untested well. Well testing is again urgently needed in Bangladesh and should be paired with better ways to raise awareness and the installation of additional deep community wells.

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Spillovers from Conservation Programs

Published September 6, 2017 by Alex Pfaff

Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino

Annual Review of Resource Economics 9:299-315

Conservation programs have increased significantly, as has the evaluation of their impacts. However,the evaluation of their potential impacts beyond program borders has been scarce.Such spillovers can significantly reduce or increase net impacts. In this review, we discuss how conservation programs might affect outcomes beyond their borders and present some evidence of when they have or have not. We focus on ﬁve major channels by which spillovers can arise:(1) input reallocation; (2) market prices; (3) learning; (4) nonpecuniary motivations; and (5) ecological-physical links. We highlight evidence for each channel and emphasize that estimates often may reﬂect multiple channels. Future research could test for spillovers within different contexts and could separate the effects of different channels.

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Heterogeneous Local Spillovers from Protected Areas in Costa Rica

Published August 3, 2017 by Alex Pfaff

Juan Robalino, Alexander Pfaff, Laura Villalobos

JAERE, volume 4, number 3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/692089

Spillovers can significantly reduce or enhance the net effects of land-use policies, yet there exists little rigorous evidence concerning their magnitudes. We examine how Costa Rica’s national parks affect deforestation in nearby areas. We find that average deforestation spillovers are not signiﬁcant in 0–5 km and 5–10 km rings around the parks. However, this average blends multiple effects that are significant and that vary in magnitude across the landscape, yielding varied net impacts. We distinguish the locations with different net spillovers by their distances to roads and park entrances — both of which are of economic importance, given critical local roles for transport costs and tourism. We find large and statistically significant leakage close to roads but far from park entrances, which are areas with high agricultural returns and less influenced by tourism. We do not find leakage far from roads (lower agriculture returns) or close to park entrances (higher tourism returns). Finally, parks facing greater threats of deforestation show greater leakage.