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on Resource Economics |
| By: | Massimo Guidolin, Manuela Pedio |
| Abstract: | Biodiversity loss is among the most severe environmental externalities facing commodity markets, yet its pricing in futures and spot markets remains poorly understood. Agricultural commodities, timber, and livestock are simultaneously the primary drivers of global habitat destruction and the assets most directly exposed to the ecosystem services they degrade. This double materiality operates more immediately in commodity markets than in the equity and bond markets on which the biodiversity-finance literature has concentrated its attention. This paper provides a critical review and research agenda organized around three pillars. First, we map ecological indicators, footprint-based metrics, and text-based attention proxies. Second, we trace the transmission channels through which ecosystem degradation reaches commodity prices: physical supply disruption, regulatory transition risk, and the financial investor channel, with particular attention to the scale-versus-intensity distinction in regulatory design. Third, we review the theoretical frameworks for commodity biodiversity pricing, explain why equity and bond results cannot be transplanted into commodity markets, and present the first systematic commodity-market evidence, consistent with intensity-based biodiversity risk being priced in spot but not futures returns. Because the commodity-specific pricing literature is nascent, the empirical section combines a review of existing conditional evidence with an original empirical analysis of a commodity return panel data set. We conclude with a structured research agenda centered on causal identification, the spot-futures wedge, climate-biodiversity integration, and data infrastructure. |
| Keywords: | biodiversity risk, commodity futures, theory of storage, species loss intensity, spot-futures wedge, transition risk, ecosystem services. |
| JEL: | G12 G13 Q51 Q57 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp26286 |
| By: | Emeline Bezin (CREM-UMR6111); Maxence Gerard (CREM-UMR6111); Ingmar Schumacher (University of Birmingham) |
| Abstract: | How will urban growth affect the long-run environment? This paper focuses on an overlooked channel: how urbanization shapes environmental values and, with them, political support for environmental protection. Our theory combines two mechanisms: the extinction of experience documented by conservation science, whereby reduced contact with nature erodes attachment to it, and a cultural transmission process involving rational socialization decisions. Both are embedded in an overlapping-generations model with rural–urban migration and voting over environmental policy. When the extinction of experience dominates, urbanization erodes support for environmental protection. However, when socialization is effective, the picture reverses: the interaction between location and socialization choices gives rise to a process of cultural dissemination through which urbanization raises environmental values. Our main theoretical predictions are consistent with a set of stylized facts on environmental preferences, residential location, and policy support that we document using data from the International Social Survey Programme. |
| Keywords: | Urbanization, political economy, environmental values, cultural transmission, extinction of experience |
| JEL: | Q58 D72 Z13 R11 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bir:birmec:26-05 |
| By: | Simon Gaechter (University of Nottingham); Jonathan F. Schulz (George Mason University); Christian Thoeni (University of Lausanne) |
| Abstract: | Can common institutions produce different gains from cooperation across culturally diverse environments? We address this question using standardized repeated public-goods experiments, with and without punishment, in 43 diverse countries (n = 3, 876). The design permits direct comparison of voluntary cooperation, conditional cooperation, peer-enforced cooperation, and punishment behavior under identical incentives. We document large cross-societal differences: realized cooperation gains vary by 81 percentage points between the highest- and lowest-gain subject pools. We interpret these patterns through a belief-based model: everyday experiences of cooperation shape expectations about others’ cooperation and the use of punishment. Consistent with model predictions, cooperation and punishment correlate with a cross-country Cooperative Environment Index. Mechanism experiments (n = 1, 092) exogenously vary exposure to strong enforcement. This exposure raises later beliefs and cooperation after enforcement is removed. Together, the findings provide evidence that common institutions can generate unequal gains because their effectiveness depends on expectations about cooperation and its enforcement. |
| Keywords: | Cross-cultural experiments; voluntary cooperation; peer punishment; institutional quality; cultural values; cooperative environment index; ABC model of cooperation; mechanism experiments |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notcdx:2026-06 |