Working Papers

Deterring Extraction from the Commons: Evidence from an Experiment.

Resource management programs use monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms to enforce quota regimes governing harvest from common pool resources. The existing literature provides mixed evidence regarding the effectiveness of deterrence in strategic choice environments. In a controlled laboratory experiment, this paper varies deterrence parameters, while keeping expected penalties constant, to test the effects of enforcement under four quota regimes governing harvest from a shared resource. Controlling for individual risk attitudes, the main findings from the experiment are that (i) monitoring and sanction mechanisms reduce socially detrimental harvest, (ii) a higher probability of monitoring is more effective than an equivalent increase in the severity of sanctions, (iii) a combination of fines and rewards is more effective than fines alone in reducing socially detrimental harvest in all deterrence parameter combinations, and (iv) monitoring and sanctions are more effective on free-riders than on conditional or unconditional cooperators.

The Power to Conserve: A Field Experiment on Electricity Use in Qatar, with Omar al-Ubaydli, Alecia Cassidy, Ahmed A. Khalifa and Michael K. Price
[GRI Working Paper] [NBER Working Paper]

High resource users often have the strongest response to behavioral interventions promoting conservation. Yet, little is known about how to motivate them. We implement a field experiment in Qatar, where residential customers have some of the highest energy use per capita in the world. We use two normative treatments - a religious message quoting the Qur'an, and a nationalistic message reminding households that Qatar prioritizes energy conservation. The treatments reduce electricity use by 3.8% and both messages are equally effective. Using machine learning methods on supplemental survey data, we elucidate how agency, motivation, and responsibility activate conservation responses.

The Role of Behaviour in Vulnerability to Air Pollution - A Framework and Evidence Review, with Daire McCoy, Antonio Avila-Uribe and Ganga Shreedhar

This paper first proposes a framework to describe vulnerability to air pollution, then uses this framework to assemble and integrate recent evidence on population and behavioural risk factors associated with vulnerability to air pollution in high-income countries. We consider a broad definition of vulnerability, comprised of three interrelated dimensions: (i) susceptibility, (ii) exposure and (iii) adaptation. We advance the existing literature by: (i) developing a mathematical definition which allows us to explicitly decompose vulnerability into different components; (ii) outlining the interactions between the components, in particular how adaptation can mitigate exposure and susceptibility; (iii) reviewing the evidence-base of over 150 articles based on high and middle income countries and examining how susceptibility, exposure and adaptation can interact in systematic ways.

Publications

Soni, A., & Chatterjee, A. (2023). Not just income: The enabling role of institutional confidence and social capital in household energy transitions in India. Energy Research & Social Science, 98, 103020.

Transitioning to cleaner forms of cooking energy is a key facet of sustainable development. Despite numerous programs, the transition in developing countries remains slow and sometimes non-existent. Even when cleaner sources of cooking energy are adopted, their use is often temporary, with households continuing to use traditional energy sources. While literature identifies the importance of affordability and access, factors such as trust in local institutions and social capital remain under-explored. We aim to fill this gap by using household-level panel data to estimate drivers of clean cooking technology adoption and sustained fuel use in India. We add to the current scholarship on determinants of household energy transition by analyzing the relationship between household energy choices and institutional factors and social capital. We employ a logistic regression analysis to examine stove technology adoption, and complement it with an ordinary least squares model to measure factors that drive sustained fuel usage. The results indicate that participation in local community organizations and trust in local government is positively related to both adoption of stove technologies and expenditure on liquefied petroleum gas. Female education and membership in women-led networks also play an important role in driving fuel adoption. Policies aimed at promoting transitions to cleaner cooking fuels should, therefore, leverage community and social networks to promote sustained fuel use. Any national programs should be anchored in local contexts and involve local actors.