Essays in Environmental Economics

This dissertation uses quasi-experimental methods to study how politics and governance determine the allocation of natural resources and the consequences for economic development. The first chapter, in the context of dams around the globe, combines a novel hydrology-based measure of dam exposure with measures of bilateral relations to quantify the downstream externalities of dams, within and across borders, and how the transboundary externalities are related to international relations. The second chapter, in the context of Bihar, India, provides the first quantitative causal evidence on the local environmental and economic impacts of sand mining, which constitutes 85% of global mineral extraction. To inform how resource access policy might be designed to be both welfare-improving and politically enforceable, we focus on how the costs and benefits are distributed among socially dominant versus marginal groups. The third chapter studies the public provision of water infrastructure at the national scale in India, assessing whether meeting government water provision targets achieves the commonly stated goal of educational gains, especially for girls.