Forest plantations have increased rapidly in the last three decades, to a large extent due to direct and indirect financial incentives. At the farm level, forestry incentives can affect the investment decisions of small forest landowners and bring socioeconomic externalities or unintended effects associated with farm management. The purpose of this study is to assess the ex post impacts of a forestry subsidy on land use changes and off-farm income experienced by Chilean small forest landowners.

In this paper, we try to understand pesticide input decisions among Vietnamese rice producers by examining the production risk effects of pesticide use, applying both a lottery game and a more traditional production function approach. Production function estimates show that excessive pesticide use makes production riskier. This result is supported by the lottery approach, which signals that more risk averse farmers use less pesticide, implying that pesticide is a risk-increasing input.

This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of fuel choices and intensity of fuelwood use for residential heating and cooking in central-southern Chile. By using information from a sample of 2761 households in nine urban areas, we first investigate households’ choices of the main fuel used for heating by means of multinomial models. Then we examine the intensity of fuelwood use through fractional probit models. These models allow analyzing the interdependence of fuel use by households, while taking into account households’ individual heterogeneity.

We investigate whether a social information campaign aimed at reducing water use causes a spillover effect on the use of electricity. On average, water use decreased by 6 percent for the treatment group. We identify a positive spillover effect on electricity use among households that had efficient use of water before the campaign. The effect is sizeable: almost a 9 percent reduction. We argue that these results are consistent with a model of cognitive dissonance where the efficient households infer information about electricity use from the water use information.