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My dissertation is comprised of three separate essays in the field of environmental economics. The first chapter experimentally models the climate change social dilemma and evaluates how heterogeneous environmental impacts and unequal endowments affect the propensity to avoid catastrophic climate change. Introducing a punishment mechanism to alleviate the collective bargaining problem, I identify the external factors and intrinsic preferences that impede cooperation. Inequality and delayed contributions negatively affect successful provision, while higher levels of collective-risk increase the probability of threshold attainment. A consensual punishment mechanism incentivizes cooperation in low-risk and heterogeneous groups, overcoming the collective action problem.The second chapter investigates the efficacy of military and legal efforts to thwart environmental domestic terrorism. While passive legislative interventions increase the cost of illegal action and proactive policies thwart terrorism with preemptive strikes, the efficacy of counterterrorism efforts has been questioned. Using quarterly data from 1980 to 2014, I analyze the effect of counterterrorism policy on radical environmental direct action (REDA) modes of attack and the severity of illegal actions. Combining vector autoregression and intervention analysis under a rational choice framework, I find that while legislative policies have decreased the economic severity of attacks, incidents have more than doubled. Proactive interventions reduce domestic terrorism, but by a smaller magnitude than the increase from passive legislation. Substituting between modes of attack and ideological targets, policies have tripled the use of explosives while REDA attacks against people have increased more than sixfold in the long run.In the final chapter, I explore the role of payments for ecosystem services (PES) and their impact on conservation efforts to avoid deforestation in developing nations. Targeting counterfactual-based studies to identify additionality gains and minimize leakage impacts, I perform a meta-analysis to evaluate how PES program design and market factors impact avoided deforestation. Program design variables include contract length, payment differentiation, and participation targeting. Environmental variables proxy for opportunity costs by controlling for alternative land use prices and socioeconomic conditions. As each dimension has a varying impact on avoided deforestation, these results aim to influence future market-based interventions.

Introduction: Economics and Environmental Degradation -- Environmental Externalities and Their Internationalization Through Voluntary Approaches -- Monetary Valuation of the Environment -- A Comparison of Environmental Policy Instruments -- International Environmental Problems

Top European and American scholars contribute to this cutting-edge volume on little-researched areas of environmental and resource economics. Topics include spatial economics, poverty and development, experimental economics, large-scale risk and its management, organizational economics, technological innovation and diffusion and many more

Sustainable development, climate policy, biodiversity conservation - all these represent flash points at the intersection of environmental science, economics, and public policy. This volume offers a snapshot of environmental economic research on a range of policy-relevant problems. Academic contributions are complemented by the views of policy makers on environmental policy priorities, the usefulness of academic research for decision making, and the future of applied research.

In this dissertation, I contribute to three strands of the environmental economics literature: (1) regulation of air pollution from stationary sources, (2) interaction between behavioral biases and consumer demand for energy, and (3) long-term distributional outcomes of policies that seek to mitigate climate damages from the housing sector. The first paper looks at how environmental regulations work in practice -- assessing ex-post the causal consequences of a specific policy, the Large Combustion Plant Directive. The Large Combustion Plant Directive was a key policy instrument to limit air pollution from power stations in the European Union. The Directive set limits on emissions of harmful sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particle dust from combustion plants with total capacity of at least 50 MWth. A fundamental empirical problem is to create a valid counterfactual, to understand what would have happened in the absence of such a regulation. As is the case with most command and control policies, all plants fell under regulation, but the stringency was vintage-differentiated. More crucially, a group of plants chose to opt-out of emissions performance standards but were instead required to gradually cease operations. I exploit the structure of the directive to construct valid control groups to assess the effectiveness of emission performance standards. Evidence from this empirical study suggests that EU-wide emission performance standards, when sufficiently stringent, are an effective instrument for pollution abatement at the plant stack-level. However, the regulation was not ambitious enough and in fact allowed business-as-usual operations for some of the most carbon-intensive power plants operating in the European Union. In the second paper, I exploit a large-scale natural experiment in utility billing cycles at the building level to identify the salience effect of costs on energy consumption. By exploiting variation in billing cycles, I find new evidence for consumer inattention to energy costs: consumers ...