Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Crop Residue Burning

B. Kelsey Jack, Seema Jayachandran, Namrata Kala and Rohini Pande

No 30690, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Particulate matter significantly reduces life expectancy in India. We use a randomized controlled trial in the Indian state of Punjab to evaluate the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (also known as payments for ecosystem services, or PES) in reducing crop residue burning, which is a major contributor to the region’s poor air quality. Credit constraints and distrust may make farmers less likely to comply with standard PES contracts, which only pay the participant after verification of compliance. We randomize paying a portion of the money upfront and unconditionally. Despite receiving a lower reward for compliance, farmers offered partial upfront payment are 8-12 percentage points more likely to comply than are farmers offered the standard contract. Burning measures derived from satellite imagery indicate that PES with upfront payments significantly reduced burning, while standard PES payments were inframarginal. We also show that PES with an upfront component is a cost-effective way to improve India’s air quality.

JEL-codes: O13 Q01 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-exp
Note: DEV EEE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30690.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Crop Residue Burning (2025)
Working Paper: Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Crop Residue Burning (2023)
Working Paper: Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Crop Residue Burning (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30690

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30690

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().