ESSAYS IN DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS

This dissertation comprises one chapter in Environmental Economics and two chapters in Development Economics. The Development Economics chapters address cattle health and production challenges in Kenya, aiming to improve economic well-being through framed field experiments and impact evaluation methods. The Environmental Economics chapter focuses on sustainability, examining quality–quantity issues in common pool resources CPR. The first chapter examines a CPR where appropriations deteriorate the quality of the resource and, thus, its impact on the exploitation of the CPR. Findings reveal that (i) higher quality of the CPR could induce firms to overuse the resource and (ii) first-period appropriations with abatement decrease in the regeneration rate. However, abatement induces an overuse of the resource when the quality of the CPR improves. The second chapter examines how women’s empowerment influences livestock management and household well-being in Kenya, focusing on East Coast Fever (ECF) vaccination. Using a lab-in-field experiment, the study analyzes how decision-making autonomy and control over income affect vaccination choices. The results highlight the importance of resource ownership and suggest that policies promoting joint ownership and income rights can strengthen women’s decision-making and economic security. The third chapter provides market-based estimates of demand for the ITM vaccine against ECF in Narok County, Kenya. Using observational data, the analysis shows that demand is highly price-sensitive once endogeneity is addressed, with herd size emerging as a consistent driver of adoption. Remote households appear to mitigate higher access costs through bulk purchasing, highlighting economies of scale in vaccine use. These findings suggest that affordability, distribution constraints, and batch-size requirements remain key barriers to adoption.