Jaffe and Palmer (1997) present three distinct variants of the so‐called Porter Hypothesis. The “weak” version of the hypothesis posits that environmental regulation will stimulate environmental innovations. The “narrow” version of the hypothesis asserts that flexible environmental policy regimes give firms greater incentive to innovate than prescriptive regulations, such as technology‐based standards. Finally, the “strong” version posits that properly designed regulation may induce cost‐saving innovation that more than compensates for the cost of compliance. In this paper, we test the significance of these different variants of the Porter Hypothesis using data on the four main elements of the hypothesised causality chain (environmental policy, research and development, environmental performance, and commercial performance). The analysis draws upon a database that includes observations from approximately 4,200 facilities in seven OECD countries. In general, we find strong support for the “weak” version, qualified support for the “narrow” version, but no support for the “strong” version.

It is often purported that unusually dry conditions provoke riots by intensifying the competition for water. The present paper explores this hypothesis, using data from Sub-Saharan Africa. We rely on monthly data at the cell level (0:5 0:5 degrees), an approach that is tailored to the fact that riots are short-lived and local events. Using a drought index to proxy for deviations of the actual climatic water balance from the normal one, we …nd that a one-standard-deviation fall in the index (signaling drier conditions) raises the likelihood of a riot in a given cell and month by 8.5 percent. We further observe that the e¤ect of unusual dryness is substantially larger in cells that combine a low supply of blue water with signi…cant agricultural activity, a …nding that supports the relevance of the water-competition mechanism.JEL classi…cation: D74, O13

Using a randomized experiment in a public Swiss university, we study the impact of online live streaming of lectures on student achievement and attendance. We find that (i) attending lectures via live streaming lowers achievement for low-ability students and increases achievement for high-ability ones; (ii) students use the live streaming technology only occasionally, apparently when random events make attending in class too costly, and (iii) offering live streaming reduces in-class attendance only mildly. These findings have important implications for the effective design of education policies.

This article investigates the relationship between insecure property rights and land disputes using farm household panel data from the highlands of Ethiopia. Our identification strategy relies on the gradual rollout of a land certification program. We find that tenure security significantly reduces the likelihood for a farm household to experience land disputes. We further document that water scarcity during the rainy seasons is an important determinant of land disputes. However, farm households that have been certified are significantly less likely to experience land disputes triggered by water scarcity than farm households without land certification. 5 We provide a simple theoretical framework in the online supplementary appendix guiding these empirical results. Our theoretical framework is a simple bargaining model with private information. We assume that agents bargain over a piece of land. One agent can illegally use the land, albeit at a (privately known) cost. This cost reflects the strength of property rights in the region: the cost is substantive if tenure security is strong, and low if property rights are ill-defined. When facing adverse weather shocks, the temptation to encroach on the land of the tenant rises along with water scarcity. 6 Ethiopia has implemented one of the largest, fastest, and least expensive land registration and certification reforms in Africa according to Deininger et al. (2008).

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We develop a climate-economy model with generational heterogeneity and with the potential for climate-policy-induced technological change. We use the model to assess the distributional implications of climate policies that recycle generated revenues to finance research and development in the energy sector. We show that while the investments of climate-policy rents that are used to accelerate innovation are likely to be welfare-improving, as long as significant market failures exist, they are also likely to exacerbate the distributional inequities created across generations by climate-change policies.

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