How do citizens access the state? While the nature of citizen-state relations is a key element of democracy, most analyses focus on only one element of this interaction, such as the links between citizens and their representatives, the use of an intermediary to facilitate service delivery, or payment of a bribe to a bureaucrat. In this paper, I evaluate the relationship between citizens and the state in India, focusing on the choices citizens make over a range of potential strategies for accessing state resources and the combinations of these strategies. I consider potential demographic, regional, and institutional causes of variation in these choices and find that citizens engage with the state in quite different ways depending on the government department from which they require services and the state in which they live. These analyses highlight the importance of a more comprehensive evaluation of citizen-state interactions that takes into account the spectrum of choices citizens may or may not have for accessing public services, thus providing a more complete view of democratic practice in India today.

Using data from a randomized experiment in rural China, this paper studies the influence of social networks on the decision to adopt a new weather insurance product and the mechanisms through which social networks operate. We provided financial education to a random subset of farmers and found a large social network effect on take-up: for untreated farmers, having an additional friend receiving financial education raised take-up by almost half as much as obtaining financial education directly, a spillover effect equivalent to offering a 15% reduction in the average insurance premium. By varying the information available to individuals about their peers’ take-up decisions and using randomized default options, we show that the positive social network effect is not driven by the diffusion of information on purchase decisions, but instead by the diffusion of knowledge about insurance. We also find that social network effects are larger in villages where households are more strongly connected, and when people who are the first to receive financial education are more central in the social network.

Since January of 2005, 250 building projects in the City of Singapore have been awarded the Green Mark for
energy efficiency and sustainability. This paper analyzes the private returns to these investments, evaluating
the premium in asset values they command in the market. We analyze almost 37,000 transactions in the
Singapore housing market to estimate the economic impact of the Green Mark program on Singapore's
residential sector.

We adopt a two-stage research design; in the first stage, a hedonic pricing model is estimated based on
transactions involving green and non-green residential units in 697 individual projects or estates. In the
second stage, the fixed effects estimated for each project are regressed on the location attributes of the
projects, as well as control variables for a Green Mark rating. Our results suggest that the economic returns to
green building are substantial.

This is one of the first analyses of the economics of green building in the residential sector, and the only one
analyzing property markets in Asia. Our results provide insight about the operation of the housing market in
one country, but the policy implications about the economic returns to sustainable investments in the
property market may have broader applications for emerging markets in Asia.

Improving security of tenure over agricultural land has recently been the focus of a number
of large land certification programs. While the main justification for these efforts was to increase
productive investments and facilitate land rental transactions, we show that if access rights were
tied to actual land use in the previous regime, these programs can also lead to increased outmi­
gration from agrarian communities. We analyze the Mexican ejido land certification program
which, from 1993 to 2006, awarded ownership certificates to 3.6 million farmers on about half the
country’s agricultural land. Using the program rollout over time and space as an identification
strategy, we show that households that obtained land certificates were 28% more likely to have a
migrant member. The effect was larger for households with ex-ante weaker property rights and
with larger off-farm opportunities. At the community level, certificates led to a 5% reduction in
population, and the effects were larger in lower land quality environments. We show evidence
of certificates leading to sorting, with larger farmers staying and land-poor farmers leaving in
high productivity areas. We use satellite imagery to determine that, on average, cultivated land
was not reduced because of the program, consistent with increases in agricultural labor produc­
tivity. Furthermore, in high productivity areas, the certification program led to an increase in
cultivated land compared to low productivity ones. We confirm the validity of the results with
checks on exogeneity of the rollout process relative to migration trends and on attrition in the
panel dataset we use.

Energy consumption in the residential sector offers an important opportunity for
conserving resources. However, much of the current debate regarding energy efficiency
in the housing market focuses on the physical and technical determinants of energy
consumption, neglecting the role of the economic behavior of resident households. In
this paper, we analyze the extent to which the use of gas and electricity is determined
by the technical specifications of the dwelling as compared to the demographic
characteristics of the residents. Our analysis is based on a sample of more than
300,000 Dutch homes and their occupants. The results indicate that residential gas
consumption is determined principally by structural dwelling characteristics, such
as the vintage, building type, and characteristics of the dwelling, while electricity
consumption varies more directly with household composition, in particular income
and family composition. Combining these results with projections on future economic
and demographic trends, we find that, even absent price increases for residential
energy, the aging of the population and their increasing wealth will roughly offset
improvements in the energy efficiency of the building stock resulting from policy
interventions and natural revitalization

This paper emphasizes the importance of bringing off-peak rates down to their
marginal costs so that the current mispricing of electricity does not act as a substantial
deterrent to the reduction of greenhouse gases, as through vehicle electrification. It
considers whether there are feasible, efficient and equitable time-varying electricity rate
structures that will be attractive to large numbers of residential customers with smart
meters. One family of rate structures called Household On and Off Peak (HOOP) plans meets
the efficiency criterion and is promising for meeting the distributional ones. HOOP plans
utilize marginal-cost time-based rates except for fixed infrastructure charges that vary by
customer group and cover nonmarginal expenses. Two alternative equity principles to guide
the assignment of the fixed infrastructure charges to different groups are considered. A
representative sample of California residences with usage data for each 15 minute interval
for a one year period enablessome preliminary tests ofthese HOOP designs. Simple
statewide versions of these designs replicate reasonably closely the actual bill distribution
that results from the independent and far more complex rate structures in use by the three
separate utilities that service these residences, suggesting that each utility could use HOOP
designs to meet the necessary criteria.

Awareness of global warming and the extent of greenhouse gas emissions have focused more attention upon energy efficiency in building. Moreover, the inventory of “green” office space in the United States has increased dramatically since the introduction of rating schemes that attest to the energy efficiency or sustainability of commercial buildings. In some metropolitan areas, the supply of certified office buildings has more than doubled in the last decade, and there are a few metropolitan areas where “green” office space now accounts for more than a quarter of the total office stock. In this paper, we analyze the diffusion of buildings certified for energy efficiency across US property markets. Using a panel of 48 metropolitan areas observed over the last fifteen years, we trace the diffusion of green building practices across the country.

We then model the geographic patterns and dynamics of building certification, relating industry composition, changes in economic conditions, characteristics of the local commercial property market, and the presence of human capital, to the cross-sectional variation in energy-efficient building technologies and the diffusion of those technologies over time. Understanding the determinants and the rate at which energy-efficient building practices diffuse over space and time is important for designing policies to affect resource consumption in the built environment.

Using data from a two-year randomized experiment in rural China, this paper studies the influence of social networks on the decision to adopt a new weather insurance product and the mechanisms through which social networks operate. In the first year, I provided financial education to
a random subset of farmers and found a large social network effect on insurance take-up: for untreated farmers, having an additional friend receiving financial education raises take-up by almost half as much as obtaining financial education directly, a spillover effect equivalent to offering a 12% reduction in the average insurance premium. By varying the information available to subjects about their peers’ take-up decisions and using randomized default options, I show that the positive social network effect is not driven by scale effects, imitation, or informal risk-sharing, but instead by the diffusion of insurance knowledge. One year later, social networks continue to affect insurance demand: observing an above-median share of friends receiving payouts increases insurance take-up at a rate equivalent to about 50% of the impact of receiving payouts directly. I also find that social network effects are larger in villages where households are more strongly connected, and when the people who receive financial education first are more central in the social network.