Institutions play a significant role in stabilising large-scale cooperation
in common pool resource management. Without restrictions to govern human
behaviour, most natural resources are vulnerable to overexploitation. This study
used a sample size of 336 households and community-level data from 30 communities
around Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, to analyse the relationship
between institutions and biodiversity outcomes in community-based wildlife
conservation. Our results suggest a much stronger effect of institutions on biodiversity

In this paper, we identify economic implications of the pressure to share resources within a social network. Through a set of field experiments in rural Tanzania we randomly increased the expected harvest of the treatment group by the assignment of an improved and much more productive variety of maize.

Village democratization in rural China is found to have profound impacts on many socio-economic aspects, but little is understood as to how welfare impacts may occur through farmers' principal production activities. This study helps to fill this gap by investigating how village democracy affects rural household welfare through these channels, using a unique household survey. The authors first establish a theoretical framework that links democracy to household welfare through changes in production efficiency.

Costa Rica is considering expanding their marine protected areas (MPAs) to conserve marine resources. Due to the importance of households’ responses to an MPA in defining the MPA’s ecological and economic outcomes, this paper uses an economic decision framework to interpret data from near-MPA household surveys to inform this policy discussion. The model and data suggest that the impact of expanding MPAs relies on levels of enforcement and on-shore wages.

This paper uses a bio-economic model to analyze wildlife conservation in two habitats adjacent to a national park by two types of communities in Zimbabwe. One community is made up of peasant farmers operating under a benefit-sharing scheme such as CAMPFIRE, while the other is made up of commercial farmers practicing game farming in a conservancy. Both communities exploit wildlife by selling hunting licenses to foreign hunters but with different levels of success. The park agency plays a central role by authorizing the harvest quota for each community.

This article investigates the impact of an institutional intervention on market efficiency in Ethiopia. More specifically, it analyzes to what extent the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) in combination with regional warehouses have contributed to a reduction in price spreads between regional markets. The hypothesis is that warehouses connected to the ECX reduce the dispersion between export prices and local retail prices in different coffee growing areas, as well as the dispersion between export prices and local retail prices in different coffee growing areas.

Since 2006, China began a property reform on rural forest land, which is called "the second land reform" after the implementation of China's rural household contract responsibility system. Using a unique household survey data, we analyze the impact of grassroots democratic decision-making on investment incentives of the property right reform on forest land.

This paper develops a stochastic dynamic programming model to investigate a type of dynamic
enforcement strategy where the penalties for violations of environmental regulations are based on not only the current level of violations but also the firms’ past noncompliance records. The results show that firms’ optimal level of noncompliance would be a decreasing function of their accumulated