We live at a unique moment in history when rapid economic growth has finally lifted hundreds of millions out of deep poverty, not only in Asia and Latin America but increasingly in Africa (Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy, 2010). Yet the impending damage of climate change could reverse this.

A critical issue in the design of incentive mechanisms is the choice of whom to target. For forests, the leading schemes: [i] target locations with high ecosystem-service density; [ii] target additionality, i.e., locations where conservation would not occur without the incentive; or, at least effectively, [iii] reward previous private choices to conserve forest. We use a field experiment to examine the changes in contributions to forest conservation when we introduce each of those three selection rules.

Incentives conditioned on socially desired acts such as donating blood, departing conflict or mitigating climate change have increased in popularity. Many incentives are targeted, excluding some of the potential participants based upon characteristics or prior actions. We hypothesize that pro-sociality is reduced by exclusion, in of itself (i.e., fixing prices and income), and that the rationale for exclusion influences such 'behavioral spillovers'. 

In this paper we tested if social networks at the origin, measured by religious affiliation, can affect the out-migration decision. For this purpose, we estimated a conditional logit model and a mixed logit model for the decision to migrate to one of 13 destinations, or to stay at the original location. In general, the results were as expected, given theoretical considerations, and were robust to model specification and estimation procedures. Moreover, the results support the hypothesis that religious attachment affects migration decisions.

We study the economic performance of Benthic Resource Management Areas (BRMAs) in central-southern Chile. The analysis considers 26 managed areas with Agreements of Use declaring Chilean abalone (Concholepas concholepas) to be the main exploited benthic resource from 2001 to 2003. Our analysis explores the role played by several characteristics thought to be potential BRMA performance determinants. These variables were defined and grouped into four types: economic, environmental–biological, institutional–organizational, and organizational leader.