Substantial international aid is spent reducing the cost of contraception in developing countries, as part of a larger effort to reduce global fertility and increase investment per child worldwide. The importance for fertility behaviors of keeping contraceptive prices low, however, remains unclear. Targeting of subsidies and insufficient price variation have hindered prior attempts to estimate ...

This paper presents an overview of the key economic results associated with the use of non-renewable resources. The basic Hotelling model of resource depletion is discussed, followed by several extensions. The fundamental result is that scarcity rent rises at the discount rate, and that at equilibrium, marginal benefits from extraction must equal the marginal economic cost. If marginal extracti...

Frankel and Romer [Frankel, J., Romer, D., 1999. Does trade cause growth? American Economic Review 89 (3), 379-399] documented positive effects of geographically determined trade openness on economic growth. At the same time, critics fear that openness can lead to a "race to the bottom" that increases pollution and reduces government resources for investments in health and education. We use Fra...