This paper quantifies the economic impacts of flooding in the Ba River and Penang River catchments in Viti Levu, Fiji. We conducted a detailed assessment of flood damage stemming from two major flooding events in 2012 that severely affected the two important catchments, primarily by using...

While climate change is widely regarded as a threat to food security in southern Africa, few studies attempt to link the science of climate change impacts on agriculture with the specificities of smallholder livelihoods. In this paper, we build a series of linear programming (LP) farm-household...

Climate change will directly affect food availability and security. Because food production is fundamentally a biological process that is a function, in part, of temperature and moisture, the agricultural sector’s potential vulnerability is particularly large. While there is ongoing scientific...

This paper builds a model determining optimal capacities of diversion dams or water transfer projects. The model incorporates stochastic inflows to the dams and the role of the dam capacity in reducing overflows, and gives a closed-form expression of the marginal benefit of capacities....

2010 AAEA Presidential Address; forthcoming in January 2011 AJAE in shortened version.

Approximately 75% of all water used by humans goes towards food production, much of which is traded internationally. This study formally models how this works in the case of crop agriculture, making use of recent advances in international trade theory and new data on the productivity by which...

This paper evaluates the effects of annual fluctuations in temperature and precipitation on labor allocation in rural Mexico. We use a 28-year panel of individuals to investigate how people adjust their sector and location of work in response to year-to-year variation in weather. Controlling for...

We examine the extent to which economic development reduces both a country's disaster risk and its social vulnerability to climate-related disasters. Global climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and various types...

Reduction of carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) has been identified as a cost effective element of the post-Kyoto strategy to achieve long-term climate objectives. The success of REDD depends primarily on the design and implementation of a financial mechanism that...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/24/11.