Financial literacy and cognitive capabilities are convincingly linked to the quality of financial decision-making, influencing savings, stock-picking, and avoidance of outright financial mistakes. Yet, there is little evidence that education intended to improve financial decision-making is successful. Using plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to state-mandated personal finance and mathema...

The demand for water for food production is rising rapidly. Although during the last 50 years food production met and even surpassed population growth, the forecast for the future shows a different picture. The combination of key scientific developments responsible for the green revolution, and large scale investment in water infrastructure such as dams and irrigation systems played a significa...

We show in a two-period world with endogenous savings and two assets, one of them exhibiting a stochastic return that an interest adjusted income tax is optimal. This tax leaves a safe component of interest income tax free and taxes the excess return with a special tax rate. There is no trade off between risk allocation and efficiency in intertemporal consumption. Both goals are reached. As the...

It is generally argued that in rural areas people depend more on natural environment like forest due to the economic compulsions arising out of poverty (Dasgupta and Mäler, 1995). A number of forest resources are complimentary in production and consumption to other goods and services and supplement household incomes especially in times of acute economic stress (Falconer and Arnold, 1989). The c...

Problem Statement Agricultural water management (AWM) is not a goal in itself but part of a process of resource management that provides a critical input to agricultural production and farmer incomes. Today, huge losses in irrigation systems and poor water management practices worsen the water crises that already exist. Water users were surveyed in order to explore their perception about the fa...

This paper studies the impact of income taxes on intensive and extensive labor supply decisions for older workers. The literature provides little evidence about the responsiveness of the older population to tax incentives, though the tax code is a potentially important mechanism for affecting retirement behavior. We estimate the intensive and extensive margins jointly with a new approach accoun...

OVERVIEW Eight years of octopus fishery records from southwest Madagascar reveal significant positive impacts from 36 periodic closures on: (a) fishery catches and (b) village fishery income, such that (c) economic benefits from increased landings outweigh costs of foregone catch. Closures covered ~20% of a village's fished area and lasted 2-7 months. FISHERY CATCHES FROM EACH CLOSED SITE Oct...