Recent are_ucb items

No More Grading: Incentive Compatible Peer Assessment in a Project-Based Course

Fri, 3 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We describe a system for grading collaborative student work that hasbeen developed and refined over eight years of a project-basedundergraduate course. Students complete four team projects persemester, with teams reassigned each round. After each project, everystudent evaluates other teams' deliverables, assesses their ownteammates' contributions, and predicts the scores they themselves willreceive. These three streams of assessment data are combined usingsingular value decomposition (SVD) applied to residualized evaluationmatrices. Residualization removes evaluator-specific biases (thetendency to rate generously or harshly); SVD then extracts thedominant latent quality axis from the bias-corrected data, weightingquestions by their informativeness. Scores are aggregated via mediansfor robustness to outlier evaluators. Each student's composite gradereflects five components: team quality, individual contribution asassessed by teammates, evaluator discrimination (rewarding carefulassessment...

Credit & Welfare Across the Lean Season

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Consumption expenditures in rural areas of low-income countries are highly variable across seasons, yet the literature still lacks a standard framework for asking whether seasonal poverty reflects local credit market failure or poor integration with the broader economy. We develop an intertemporal model of farmers’ portfolio choices under seasonal price risk and borrowing constraints, and derive a sign diagnostic: The amount a farmer is willing to pay for a small risk-free bond (call this price q) must rise in response to a positive income shock if credit constraints bind, but fall if precautionary motives dominate. We apply this framework to a randomized post-harvest loan program in Gombe, Nigeria, and supplement the experiment by also collecting high-frequency data on prices, stocks, and expenditures. The loan sharply reduces the marginal utility of expenditure around delivery, but q never rises over the full follow-up. Precautionary savings, not credit constraints, govern the...

The Effects of "Buy American": Electric Vehicles and the Inflation Reduction Act

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We provide the first ex post microeconomic welfare analysis of the electric vehicle (EV) tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Relative to pre-IRA policy, the credits generated $1.96 in domestic benefits per dollar of government spending, with taxpayer cost of $36,500 per additional EV. Relative to having no EV credits, they yielded $1.11 in domestic benefits per dollar of government spending. A leasing loophole that sidestepped domestic content rules created negative domestic benefits. A prominent example of green industrial policy, the credits harmed foreign countries by shifting surplus to domestic producers and helped them by decreasing CO2 emissions.

Consumer Demand with Price Aggregators and Low-Rank Cross-Price Effects

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Consumer Demand with Price Aggregators and Low-Rank Cross-Price Effects

Airport Arrivals and Impacts on the Local Hospitality Sector:Evidence from Greater Los Angeles

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This report presents a detailed analysis of airport arrivals and local economic impact for the Los Angeles five-airport region (LAX, BUR, SNA, ONT, LGB) over 2015–2024. It integrates three components: (1) regression models linking final-destination arrivals to hotel room revenue and accommodation-sector GDP; (2) a specification search identifying the optimal lag structure for monthly data; and (3) an event study identifying ten statistically significant turning and inflection points over the decade.

Community Benefits of Anchor Enterprises: Evidence from California Utility Operations

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This report quantifies how a single large employer’s local payrolls drives three critical dimensions of the San Luis Obispo (SLO) and Santa Barbara (SB) county economy: residential home prices, real estate sector output, and the cost of outstanding municipal debt. The analysis covers 28 ZIP codes from 2015Q1 through 2024Q4 (947 ZIP-quarter observations) and uses average annual compensation from the Diablo Canyon Power Plant (DCPP) workforce as the primary salary proxy — an exogenously determined income anchor in a region with limited other large employers. All models are estimated with HC1-robust ordinary least squares (OLS), and the preferred specification for each outcome uses ZIP code fixed effects (FE) to isolate within-locality, over-time salary effects.

Deep Learning Projects Jurisdiction of New and Proposed Clean Water Act Regulation

Mon, 9 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Projecting the effects of proposed policy reforms is challenging because no outcome data exist for regulations that governments have not yet implemented. We propose an ex ante deep learning framework that can project effects of proposed reforms by mapping outcomes observed under past regulations onto the legal criteria of proposed future policies (i.e., by “relabeling”). We apply this framework to study changes in jurisdiction of the US Clean Water Act (CWA). We compare our ex ante deep learning projection of jurisdiction under the Supreme Court’s Sackett decision against widely used projections from domain experts. Ex ante machine learning generates exceptional performance improvements over the leading domain expert model that the US Environmental Protection Agency currently uses, with 65 times more accurate identification of jurisdictional sites. We also develop an ex post deep learning model trained with data after policy implementation. Ex post deep learning performs...

Monitoring Maize Yield Variability over Space and Time with Unsupervised Satellite Imagery Features

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recent innovations in task-agnostic imagery featurization have lowered the computational costs of using machine learning to predict ground conditions from satellite imagery. These methods hold particular promise for the development of imagery-based monitoring systems in low-income regions, where data and computational resources can be limited. However, these relatively simple prediction pipelines have not been evaluated in developing-country contexts over time, limiting our understanding of their performance in practice. Here, we compute task-agnostic random convolutional features from satellite imagery and use linear ridge regression models to predict maize yields over space and time in Zambia, a country prone to severe droughts and crop failure. Leveraging Landsat and Sentinel 2 satellite constellations, in combination with district-level yield data, our model explains 83% of the out-of-sample maize yield variation from 2016 to 2021, slightly outperforming a model trained on...

Who is responsible for ‘responsible AI’?: Navigating challenges to build trust in AI agriculture and food system technology

Tue, 6 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article presents findings from interviews that were conducted with agriculture and food system researchers to understand their views about what it means to conduct ‘responsible’ or ‘trustworthy’ artificial intelligence (AI) research. Findings are organized into four themes: (1) data access and related ethical problems; (2) regulations and their impact on AI food system technology research; (3) barriers to the development and adoption of AI-based food system technologies; and (4) bridges of trust that researchers feel are important in overcoming the barriers they identified. All four themes reveal gray areas and contradictions that make it challenging for academic researchers to earn the trust of farmers and food producers. At the same time, this trust is foundational to research that would contribute to the development of high-quality AI technologies. Factors such as increasing regulations and worsening environmental conditions are stressing agricultural systems and are opening...

Testing Parametric Distribution Family Assumptions via Differences in Differential Entropy

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Testing Parametric Distribution Family Assumptions via Differences in Differential Entropy

Navigating the Growing Prospects and Growing Pains of Managed Aquifer Recharge

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Increasing water demands and declining groundwater levels have led to rising interest in managed aquifer recharge. That interest is growing in the United States-the focus of this article-and elsewhere. Increasing interest makes sense; managed aquifer recharge can reduce water-supply challenges and provide environmental benefits, sometimes with lower costs than alternative water-management approaches. But managed aquifer recharge also faces growing pains, which will make it difficult for projects to scale up and may limit the benefits provided by those projects that do go forward. Some of the problems arise from the challenges of finding physically suitable locations for managed aquifer recharge; many derive from economics, public policy, and law; and some derive from ways in which managed aquifer recharge could exacerbate traditional equity challenges of water management. But as we explain, there also are potential solutions to these challenges, and the future success of managed...

Transboundary Livestock Disease Control: Insights from the PRC and other Greater Mekong Subregion Countries

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI, H5N1) is the most recent example of a legacy of Transboundary Animal Diseases (TADs) that have challenged the agro-food economy and public health for millennia. As the world economy becomes more highly integrated, and as the aggregate economic value of both the agro-food economy and human life continue to rise, so does the economic risk posed by TADs. These risks are especially acute in the case of TADs with mutagenic potential for animal to human (zoonotic) and human to human transmission. Estimates from the SARS epidemic (World Bank:2006) suggest that economic damages from a serious future pandemic could be measured in trillions of dollars, and some biologists see the emergence of such diseases as relatively inevitable, much like seismic risk in earthquake prone regions.

Antimicrobial resistance operates within the same animal-health system and conditions the outcomes of transboundary events. Recent global evidence indicates...

Has California Tamed the “Duck Curve”? Lessons After a Decade-Plus of Experience

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The sharp decline in the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology has led to a dramatic increase in its global deployment over the past decade. In California, a pioneer in renewable energy adoption, solar generation has increased nearly ten-fold, creating significant challenges for grid integration—most notably exemplified by the so-called “duck curve.” This review examines the state’s evolving strategies for managing an increasingly solar-dominant grid in a cost-effective manner. We highlight two key strategies. First, with procurement mandates and rebate incentives, California has strategically invested in and expanded battery energy storage systems, enabling the capture and dispatch of excess solar power during peak net load hours as a cleaner and more flexible alternative to natural gas. Second, electricity interchange, through the real-time Western Energy Imbalance Market, has enhanced operational flexibility and supported more efficient solar integration in California....

Livestock Risks and Control Measures for Antimicrobial Resistance in the Greater Mekong Subregion

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper provides an overview of risks and control measures for Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) related to the livestock sector in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Globally, the diffusion of antimicrobial use (AMU) has expanded dramatically over recent decades, remains unequally distributed (especially between developed and developing countries), but is growing most rapidly in emerging economies like those of the GMS. At the same time, these regions exhibit the highest growth rates of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), indicating that they should be primary candidates for more determined domestic and transboundary disease risk management and control measures.

This review is intended to support greater public awareness and policy activism in addressing AMU/AMR risk, promoting expansion of cattle and other agrifood trade between CMS countries and the PRC. Based on a global review of AMR risk, we offer recommendations for risk mitigation in GMS livestock husbandry and marketing...

Where is Pollution Moving? Environmental Markets and Environmental Justice

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Where is Pollution Moving? Environmental Markets and Environmental Justice

Pollution Trends and US Environmental Policy: Lessons from the Last Half Century

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article proposes and evaluates four hypotheses about US pollution and environmental policy over the last half century. First, air and water pollution have declined substantially, although greenhouse gas emissions have not. Second, environmental policy explains a large share of these trends. Third, much of the regulation of air and drinking water pollution has benefits that exceed costs, although the evidence for surface water pollution regulation is less clear. Fourth, while the distribution of pollution across social groups is unequal, market-based environmental policies and command-and-control policies do not appear to produce systematically different distributions of environmental outcomes. I also discuss recent innovations in methods and data that can be used to evaluate pollution trends and policies, including the increased use of environmental administrative data, statistical cost-benefit comparisons, analysis of previously understudied policies, more sophisticated...

Predictors of dropout and outcome in cognitive therapy for depression in a private practice setting

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The efficacy of cognitive therapy was examined for 70 depressed private practice patients. Although these patients had a broader range of psychopathology than patients in controlled outcome studies of cognitive therapy, they had comparably large reductions in Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) scores. Patients who completed treatment had an average reduction in BDI scores of 65.5%. Initial BDI scores, endogenous symptoms, compliance with homework, and the interaction between homework and initial BDI scores were statistically significant predictors of end-of-treatment BDI scores. The squared correlation between the observed end-of-treatment BDI scores and the estimated expected value was .81. Controlling for other factors, patients who did homework improved three times as much as those who did not. The effect of homework was substantially larger for patients with high initial BDI scores; thus, studies that include only patients with high initial BDI scores may overstate the importance...

Irrigation infrastructure and satellite-measured land cultivation impacts: Evidence from the Senegal river valley

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Expanding irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa is widely viewed as a promising strategy for closing yield gaps and enhancing resilience to climate change. Drawing on more than 3,000 satellite images over a 30-year period, we examine the impact of irrigation infrastructure development in the Senegal River Valley. We find that cultivation rates increase substantially following irrigation project completion. Cultivation rates are remarkably stable at around 25 percentage points above pre-irrigation levels for the first 20 years, and trend even higher from years 20 to 25. Moreover, we show that crops cultivated on irrigated land are significantly less sensitive to both positive and negative temperature shocks, underscoring the role of irrigation in climate adaptation. Despite these aggregate gains, we document considerable heterogeneity in project outcomes, with intermittent land use remaining widespread. To shed light on these patterns, we complement the satellite analysis with farmer...

Spatial Environmental Economics

Fri, 5 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How do environmental goods and policies shape spatial patterns of economic activity? How will climate change modify these impacts over the coming decades? How do agglomeration, commuting, and other spatial forces and policies affect environmental quality? We distill theoretical and empirical research linking urban, regional, and spatial economics to the environment. We present stylized facts on spatial environmental economics, describe insights from canonical environmental models and spatial models, and discuss the building blocks for papers and the research frontier in enviro-spatial economics. Most enviro-spatial research remains bifurcated into either primarily environmental or spatial papers. Research is only beginning to realize potential insights from more closely combining spatial and environmental approaches.

Globalization and the Environment

Fri, 5 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How should international economic policy address climate change? Does trade cause deforestation and endangered species depletion? How does globalization affect air and water pollution? Do trade and investment create a race to the bottom in environmental policy? How important are environmental impacts of transporting goods? We review theory and empirical work linking international trade and the environment with a focus on recent work and methods. We discuss the literature linking trade to local and global pollutants, the impact of emissions from transportation, the effect of trade on the sustainability of renewable resources, and the interaction between trade and climate policy. To shape our review, we present nine new stylized facts that, together with our review of past work, highlight questions for future research.

The gains from international carbon trade and the ranking of suboptimal climate policies

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Recently discussed international climate policies are suboptimal and do not include international trade in carbon permits. My estimate of the gains from reallocating abatement distinguishes between “fiat gains” that can be achieved by using public information to reallocate quotas, and ``market gains” that require a mechanism to reveal private or non-verifiable information. I estimate that market gains would reduce abatement costs by 7\% at an abatement target of 40\%, but this would finance only a 1\% increase in abatement. The suboptimality of policy targets favors quotas over taxes, but the lack of international trade swamps this effect, favoring taxes.

Is Air Pollution Regulation Too Lenient? Evidence from US Offset Markets

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Is Air Pollution Regulation Too Lenient? Evidence from US Offset Markets

Electricity Sector Reform in China: Progress, Performance and Challenges

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Electricity Sector Reform in China: Progress, Performance and Challenges

Genetic Engineering of Livestock: The Opportunity Cost of Regulatory Delay

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Genetically engineered (GE) livestock were first reported in 1985, and yet only a single GE food animal, the fast-growing AquAdvantage salmon, has been commercialized. There are myriad interconnected reasons for the slow progress in this once-promising field, including technical issues, the structure of livestock industries, lack of public research funding and investment, regulatory obstacles, and concern about public opinion. This review focuses on GE livestock that have been produced and documents the difficulties that researchers and developers have encountered en route. Additionally, the costs associated with delayed commercialization of GE livestock were modeled using three case studies: GE mastitis-resistant dairy cattle, genome-edited porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus-resistant pigs, and the AquAdvantage salmon. Delays of 5 or 10 years in the commercialization of GE livestock beyond the normative 10-year GE product evaluation period were associated with...

The essential but often misunderstood role of economics in groundwater sustainability research

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To promote better groundwater policymaking, hydrologists and economists need to work together. The importance of hydrology is self-evident, but we posit that questions about the causes of and potential solutions for groundwater problems, and pathways to better policymaking, are fundamentally economics questions in that they rely on understanding people’s preferences, incentives, and responses to laws and other institutions that guide people’s actions. Not surprisingly then, most hydrologic research questions implicitly arise in response to economic demands and constraints. Hydrology and economics both rely on positive science involving theory, empirical methods, calibration, and validation. Indeed, their models can be linked to characterize and understand their interdependent dynamics. While other natural and social sciences also have important roles to play, this paper focuses primarily on how economics connects (ground)water to policymaking. Economics is a broad discipline with...

Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Climate change threatens global food systems1, but the extent to which adaptation will reduce losses remains unknown and controversial2. Even within the well-studied context of US agriculture, some analyses argue that adaptation will be widespread and climate damages small3,4, whereas others conclude that adaptation will be limited and losses severe5,6. Scenario-based analyses indicate that adaptation should have notable consequences on global agricultural productivity7, 8–9, but there has been no systematic study of how extensively real-world producers actually adapt at the global scale. Here we empirically estimate the impact of global producer adaptations using longitudinal data on six staple crops spanning 12,658 regions, capturing two-thirds of global crop calories. We estimate that global production declines 5.5 × 1014 kcal annually per 1 °C global mean surface temperature (GMST) rise (120 kcal per person per day or 4.4% of recommended consumption per 1 °C; P < 0.001)....

Quantifying the global climate feedback from energy-based adaptation

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many behavioral responses to climate change are carbon-intensive, raising concerns that adaptation may cause additional warming. The sign and magnitude of this feedback depend on how increased emissions from cooling balance against reduced emissions from heating across space and time. We present an empirical approach that forecasts the effect of future adaptive energy use on global average temperature over the 21st century. We estimate that energy-based adaptation will lower global mean surface temperature in 2099 by 0.07 to 0.12 °C relative to baseline projections under Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5. This cooling avoids 0.6 to 1.8 trillion U.S. Dollars ($2019) in damages, depending on the baseline emissions scenario. Energy-based adaptation lowers business-as-usual emissions for 85% of countries, reducing the mitigation required to meet their unilateral Nationally Determined Contributions by 20% on average. These findings indicate that while business-as-usual...

Risk sharing tests and covariate shocks: Drought, Floods, and Pests in Uganda

Tue, 8 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The hallmark of full risk sharing is that agents' marginal utilities of expenditure (MUEs) have a simple factor structure; a Pareto weight is divided by an aggregate price. Take logarithms and full risk-sharing can be easily tested using panel data with two-way fixed effects. The catch is that we don't directly observe MUEs, and must infer these using data on consumption expenditures. The standard approach to this inference problem is to assume some form of homothetic utility, in which case the MUE is a function of total expenditures and a single price index, and all demands have unit price elasticities. This approach works well when the shocks being tested affect agents' budgets without changing prices; i.e., when the shocks are idiosyncratic. But "covariate" shocks may change relative prices, in which case the standard risk-sharing tests which assume that no demands are inelastic will deliver apparently perverse results.

What is the class of utility structures that...

De-normalizing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption: effects of tax measures on social norms and attitudes in the California Bay Area

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

BackgroundSocial norms can influence individual health behaviors. Shifts in social norms for smoking were critical for the effectiveness of tobacco control efforts such as excise taxes. Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) excise taxes have been implemented in municipalities across the United States to reduce SSB intake and improve health. We sought to identify trends in social norms and attitudes about healthfulness of sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption in the California Bay Area and examine whether social norms and attitudes changed following SSB taxes.MethodsData came from annual (2016–2019, 2021) cross-sectional surveys (n = 9128) in lower-income neighborhoods in Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Richmond. We assessed overall trends and compared pre-post tax changes in Oakland and San Francisco with comparison cities.ResultsWe observed a 28% reduction in social norms for SSB consumption (people’s perceptions of peers’ consumption) and variable reductions in attitudes...

An assessment of China’s methane mitigation potential and costs and uncertainties through 2060

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

China, the world’s largest methane emitter, is increasingly focused on methane mitigation in support of its climate goals, but gaps exist in the understanding of key methane sources, as well as mitigation opportunities and their associated uncertainties. We use a bottom-up modeling approach with updated methane emission projections and abatement cost analysis to account for additional sources, uncertainties, and mitigation measures in China’s energy and agricultural sectors. Here we show the significant cost-effective potential for reducing methane emissions in China by 2030, with 660 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent possible with average negative abatement costs of US$6.40 per tonne CO2e. Most of this potential exists in the energy sector, particularly coal mining, but the greater potential will shift towards agriculture by 2060. Aquaculture and biochar applications in rice cultivation have net economic benefits but need greater support for deployment, while new mitigation...

Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Natural disasters trigger complex chains of events within human societies1. Immediate deaths and damage are directly observed after a disaster and are widely studied, but delayed downstream outcomes, indirectly caused by the disaster, are difficult to trace back to the initial event1,2. Tropical cyclones (TCs)—that is, hurricanes and tropical storms—are widespread globally and have lasting economic impacts3–5, but their full health impact remains unknown. Here we conduct a large-scale evaluation of long-term effects of TCs on human mortality in the contiguous United States (CONUS) for all TCs between 1930 and 2015. We observe a robust increase in excess mortality that persists for 15 years after each geophysical event. We estimate that the average TC generates 7,000–11,000 excess deaths, exceeding the average of 24 immediate deaths reported in government statistics6,7. Tracking the effects of 501 historical storms, we compute that the TC climate of CONUS...

Changing economics of China’s power system suggest that batteries and renewables may be a lower cost way to meet peak demand growth than coal

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Concerns around reliability in China's electricity sector have rekindled interest in a traditional solution: building more coal-fired generation. However, over the past decade China's electricity sector has seen significant changes in supply costs, demand patterns, and regulation and markets, with falling costs for renewable and storage generation, "peakier" demand, and the creation of wholesale markets. These changes suggest that traditional approaches to evaluating the economics of different supply options may be outdated. This paper illustrates how a net capacity cost metric - fixed costs minus net market revenues - might be a useful metric for evaluating supply options to meet peak demand growth in China. Using a simplified example with recent resource cost data, the paper illustrates how, with a net capacity cost metric, electricity storage and solar PV may be a more cost-effective option for meeting peak demand growth than coal-fired generation.

Money or Power? Choosing Covid-19 aid in Kenya

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, 186 countries implemented direct cash transfers to households, and 181 introduced in-kind programs that lowered the cost of utilities such as electricity, water, transport, and mobile money. During times of crisis, do people prefer in-kind transfers or cash, and why? In this paper, we compare electricity transfers against a benchmark of cash transfers (mobile money) among 2000 rural and urban residents of Kenya with pre-paid electricity meter connections. We offer participants an incentivized choice between electricity transfers or mobile money, totaling approximately USD 10 to 15, and then implement their choice over three months. We generate three main findings. First, participants overwhelmingly prefer cash, with three-quarters of participants opting for mobile money even when offered electricity tokens with a cash value that is 40 percent higher, possibly due to the flexibility in expenditures or credit constraints. Second, despite relatively...

Assessing Targeting Peformance: The Case of Ghana’s LEAP Program

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Assessing Targeting Peformance: The Case of Ghana’s LEAP Program

Field-scale crop water consumption estimates reveal potential water savings in California agriculture

Mon, 1 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Efficiently managing agricultural irrigation is vital for food security today and into the future under climate change. Yet, evaluating agriculture’s hydrological impacts and strategies to reduce them remains challenging due to a lack of field-scale data on crop water consumption. Here, we develop a method to fill this gap using remote sensing and machine learning, and leverage it to assess water saving strategies in California’s Central Valley. We find that switching to lower water intensity crops can reduce consumption by up to 93%, but this requires adopting uncommon crop types. Northern counties have substantially lower irrigation efficiencies than southern counties, suggesting another potential source of water savings. Other practices that do not alter land cover can save up to 11% of water consumption. These results reveal diverse approaches for achieving sustainable water use, emphasizing the potential of sub-field scale crop water consumption maps to guide water management...

Role of pumped hydro storage in China’s power system decarbonization

Thu, 8 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

China has pledged to peak its carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Decarbonizing the power system is key to achieving these targets. Pumped hydro storage (PHS) can play a crucial role in power system decarbonization by providing both short- and long-term energy storage, facilitating the integration of variable renewable energy and maintaining grid stability. However, there is a lack of systematic assessment of how much PHS is needed to support the stability and reliability of a zero-carbon power system. Here we use a high-resolution power system planning model to investigate the role of PHS. Our findings indicate that building excessive PHS may not be the most cost-effective path to achieve zero-carbon power system, if there is no major cost reduction of PHS. A planned capacity of 120 GW of PHS is already sufficient to balance electricity supply and demand by 2050, since battery storage capacity is projected to substantially increase between 2025 and...

Safer not to know? Shaping liability law and policy to incentivize adoption of predictive AI technologies in the food system

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Governments, researchers, and developers emphasize creating "trustworthy AI," defined as AI that prevents bias, ensures data privacy, and generates reliable results that perform as expected. However, in some cases problems arise not when AI is not trustworthy, technologically, but when it is. This article focuses on such problems in the food system. AI technologies facilitate the generation of masses of data that may illuminate existing food-safety and employee-safety risks. These systems may collect incidental data that could be used, or may be designed specifically, to assess and manage risks. The predictions and knowledge generated by these data and technologies may increase company liability and expense, and discourage adoption of these predictive technologies. Such problems may extend beyond the food system to other industries. Based on interviews and literature, this article discusses vulnerabilities to liability and obstacles to technology adoption that arise,...

Spatial Procurement of Farm Products and the Supply of Processed Foods: Application to the Tomato Processing Industry

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Spatial Procurement of Farm Products and the Supply of Processed Foods: Application to the Tomato Processing Industry

Do Earmarks Target Low-Income and Minority Communities? Evidence from US Drinking Water

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The quality and inequality of US drinking water investments have gained attention after recent environmental disasters in Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere. We compare the formula-based targeting of subsidized loans provided under the Safe Drinking Water Act with the targeting of congressional drinking water earmarks (``pork barrel'' spending). Earmarks are often critiqued for potentially privileging wealthier and more politically connected communities. We find that earmarks target Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities, partly due to targeting water systems serving large populations. Earmark and loan targeting differ significantly across all the demographics we analyze. Compared to Safe Drinking Water Act loans, earmarks disproportionately target Hispanic communities but not Black or low-income communities.

Institutions, Comparative Advantage, and the Environment

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper proposes that strong financial, judicial, and labor market institutions provide comparative advantage in clean industries, and thereby improve a country’s environmental quality. Five complementary tests support this hypothesis. First, industries that depend on institutions are disproportionately clean. Second, strong institutions increase relative exports in clean industries, even conditional on environmental regulation and factor endowments. Third, an industry’s complexity helps explain the link between institutions and clean goods. Fourth, a quantitative general equilibrium model indicates that strengthening a country’s institutions decreases its pollution through relocating dirty industries abroad, though increases pollution in other countries. Fifth, cross-country differences in the composition of output between clean and dirty industries explain more of the global distribution of emissions than differences in the techniques used for production do. The comparative...

Contract Terms, Employment Shocks, andDefault in Credit Cards

Mon, 8 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Contract Terms, Employment Shocks, andDefault in Credit Cards

Measurement, reporting and Verification (MRV) of non-CO2 greenhouse gases: International Best Practices and Suggestions for China

Mon, 4 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) is a systematic approach to tracking and documenting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and emission reductions. MRV can be used across all sectors and for all GHGs to track emissions patterns, evaluate programs, and promote transparency. As methane and other short-lived climate pollutants become critical to mitigating near-term climate change impacts, MRV systems become critical in improving emission inventories; facilitating the development of climate change policies and targets, and tracking and demonstrating progress towards sustainable development. This report focuses on current sectoral issues – including the emerging roles for satellites and remote sensing technologies - and international best practices in MRV policies and programs for non-carbon dioxide (CO2) GHGs including methane, nitrous oxide (N2O), and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in specific sectors. Based on international best practices and a review of China’s current MRV...

Public–private partnerships in fostering outer space innovations

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As public and private institutions recognize the role of space exploration as a catalyst for economic growth, various areas of innovation are expected to emerge as drivers of the space economy. These include space transportation, in-space manufacturing, bioproduction, in-space agriculture, nuclear launch, and propulsion systems, as well as satellite services and their maintenance. However, the current nature of space as an open-access resource and global commons presents a systemic risk for exuberant competition for space goods and services, which may result in a "tragedy of the commons" dilemma. In the race among countries to capture the value of space exploration, NASA, American research universities, and private companies can avoid any coordination failures by collaborating in a public-private research and development partnership (PPRDP) structure. We present such a structure founded upon the principles of polycentric autonomous governance, which incorporate a decentralized...

An Information-Theoretic Method for Identifying Effective Treatments and Policies at the Beginning of a Pandemic

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Background: Identifying effective treatments and policies early in a pandemic is challenging because only limited and noisy data are available, and biological processes are unknown or uncertain. Consequently, classical statistical procedures may not work or require strong structural assumptions. An information-theoretic approach can overcome these problems and identify effective treatments and policies. The efficacy of this approach is illustrated using a study conducted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: An information-theoretic inferential approach with and without prior information was applied to the limited data available in the second month (April 24, 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic. For comparison, a second statistical analysis used a large sample with millions of observations available at the end of the pandemic’s pre-vaccination period (mid-December 2020).

Results: Even with...

Diverging climate response of corn yield and carbon use efficiency across the U.S.

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we developed an open-source package to analyze the overall trend and responses of both carbon use efficiency (CUE) and corn yield to climate factors for the contiguous United States. Our algorithm enables automatic retrieval of remote sensing data through the Google Earth Engine (GEE) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agricultural production data at the county level through application programming interface (API). Firstly, we integrated satellite products of net primary productivity and gross primary productivity based on the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor, and climatic variables from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Secondly, we calculated CUE and commonly used climate metrics. Thirdly, we investigated the spatial heterogeneity of these variables. We applied a random forest algorithm to identify the key climate drivers of CUE and crop yield, and estimated the responses of CUE and yield to climate variability...

Information Recovery in Complex Economic Systems

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Information Recovery in Complex Economic Systems

Anticipatory Effects of Regulating the Commons

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We study the regulation of common-pool resources under long implementation horizons. First, we show that future regulation can induce either anticipatory compliance or perverse incentives to accelerate extraction (a "Green Paradox''). Then, we evaluate the early effects of a major groundwater regulation in California that does not yet bind. We assemble new data and compare within pairs of neighboring agencies that face varying restrictions on extraction. Differences in future regulation do not affect measures of water-intensive investments or groundwater extraction today. This lack of anticipatory response in either direction can be explained by time preferences: high private discount rates and/or a long implementation horizon dissipate any anticipatory effects. Common-pool resources under open access face a lower risk of perverse incentives than excludable resources, but private actors still may not comply in advance.

The Dynamic Impacts of Pricing Groundwater

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper evaluates own-price dynamics in taxing environmental externalities. We exploit a natural experiment that exposed some firms to a large and persistent price increase for groundwater, a setting characterized by incomplete markets. Using five years of post-treatment data on farm-level water use, we find that water conservation doubles between the first and fifth year of the tax. Failure to account for dynamics in policies designed to manage groundwater will mischaracterize the price elasticity of demand and introduce efficiency costs.

Are land reforms granting complete property rights politically risky? Electoral outcomes of Mexico's certification program