Findings in behavioral science, including psychology, have influenced policies and reforms in many nations. Choice architecture can affect outcomes even if material incentives are not involved. In some contexts, default rules, simplification, and social norms have had even larger effects than significant economic incentives. Psychological research is helping to inform initiatives in savings, fi...

This article develops a new framework for understanding environment-conflict relations, on both theoretical grounds and through a qualitative historical analysis of the links between water and conflict in the states of Sudan and South Sudan. Theoretically, the article critiques the dominant emphases on ‘scarcity’, ‘state failure’ and ‘under-development’ within discussions of environmental secur...

Rapid climate change represents one of the top threats to biodiversity, causing declines and extinctions of many species. Range shifts are a key response, but in many cases are incompatible with the current extent of protected areas. In this study we used ensemble species distribution models to identify range changes for 21 reptile and 16 amphibian species in Romania for the 2020s and 2050s tim...

CLIMATE POLICY 9 (2009) 612–633 This article assesses the long-term economic and climatic effects of introducing price caps and price floors in hypothetical global climate change mitigation policy. Based on emission trends, abatement costs and equilibrium climate sensitivity from IPCC and IEA reports, this quantitative analysis confirms that price caps could significantly reduce economic uncert...

Lack of evidence has been the major obstacle to understanding trends and differences in human welfare over the millennia. This paper explains and applies methods that are obscure to most academics and essentially unknown to the general public. A millennial perspective is best obtained from skeletal remains, which depict not only childhood health conditions but also processes of degeneration tha...

classic Mesoamerican world system affect people's lives? And how did the actions of individuals in turn influence world-system processes? In this chapter I exarninc the linkages between large-scale world-system dynamics and individual households in an aftluent production zone of central Mexico. Morelos was an area of rich farmland whose grains and cotton-as well as bark paper, cotton textiles, ...

Some of the material here was originally presented at the World Bank Conference on Culture and Development, June 2002, as comments on Arjun Appadurai's paper (Appadurai (2002)). I am indebted to this paper for provoking some of the observations made here. I thank Dilip Mookherjee, Jonathan Morduch, Rohini Pande, and especially Srirupa Roy and Nilita Vachani for useful comments. I gratefully ack...

This paper develops a rigorous concept of institutions to investigate the interrelationships between institutional and economic change from the perspective of economic geography. We view institutions neither as behavioural regularities nor as organisations or rules, but conceive institutions as stabilisations of mutual expectations and correlated interaction. The paper discusses how economic in...