To what extent does information affect the demand for environmental quality? A randomly selected group of households in an Indian city were informed whether or not their drinking water had tested positive for fecal contamination using a simple, inexpensive test kit. Households initially not purifying their water and told that their drinking water was possibly contaminated, were 11 percentage points more likely to begin some form of home purification in the next 8 weeks than households that received no information. They spent $7.24 (at PPP) more on purification than control households. By way of comparison, an additional year of schooling of the most educated male in the household is associated with a 3 percentage-point rise in the probability of initial purification, while a standard-deviation increase in the wealth index is associated with a 12 percentage-point rise in this probability and an $11.75 rise in expenditure. Initially purifying households that received a "no contamination" result did not react by reducing purification. These results suggest that estimates of the demand for environment quality that assume full information may signficantly under-estimate it.

Crosscountry studies have found that hotter years are associated with lower output in poor countries. Using high-frequency micro-data from manufacturing firms in India, we show that worker heat stress can substantially explain this correlation. Ambient temperatures have non-linear effects on worker productivity, with declines on hot days of 4 to 9 percent per degree rise in temperature. Sustained heat also increases absenteeism. Similar temperature induced productivity declines are replicated in annual plant output from a national panel. Our estimates imply that warming between 1971 and 2009 may have decreased manufacturing output in India by at least 3 percent relative to a no-warming counterfactual.

a b s t r a c tThe global community has recognized the importance of forests for biodiversity, and has prioritized the preservation of forest biodiversity and ecosystem functions through multiple multilateral agreements and processes such as the Convention on Biodiversity's Aichi Targets and the Millennium Development Goals. The Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) provides one mechanism for tracking progress toward such goals in three particular areas: primary forest area, protected forest areas, and areas designated for the conservation of biodiversity. In this paper, we quantify current area and trends in forest areas designated for the conservation of biodiversity, protected forest areas, and primary forests by country and biome; and examine the association between total forest area and measures of protection, per-capita income, and population. The overall findings suggest that countries are increasingly protecting forests of ecological significance at the global scale (7.7% of forests were protected in 1990 rising to 16.3% in 2015), with a strong upward trend in protected areas in the tropical domain (from 12% in 1990 to 26.3% in 2015). However, primary forest area has declined by 2.5% globally and by 10% in the tropics over the period 1990-2015 (using data for countries that reported in all years). Given that many species in the tropics are endemic to primary forests, losses in that climatic domain continue to be of concern, although the rate of decline appears to be slowing.Using multiple regression analysis, we find that a 1% increase in protected area or area designated for biodiversity conservation within a country is associated with an increase in total forest area in that country of about 0.03% (p < 0.05). A 1% within-country increase in population density and per capita GDP are associated with a decrease in forest area of about 0.2% (p < 0.01) and an increase in forest area of about 0.08% (p < 0.05) respectively. Our findings also indicate that, since FRA is used as one mechanism for tracking progress toward goals like the AICHI Biodiversity Targets, country correspondents may require additional assistance toward reporting on primary forest, protected forest, and biodiversity conservation statistics.Ó 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Since 1930, areas of state-managed forest in the central Himalayas of India have increasingly been devolved to management by local communities. This article studies the long-run effects of the devolution on the cost of forest management and on forest conservation. Village council-management costs an order of magnitude less per unit area and does no worse, and possibly better, at conservation than state management. Geographic proximity and historical and ecological information are used to separate the effects of management from those of possible confounding factors.community management ͉ degradation ͉ forests ͉ impact evaluation C onserving wild areas in developing countries is generally less costly and has higher benefits in terms of biological diversity than doing the same in developed countries (1). However, national governments in developing countries may not find forest conservation economically justifiable, even though it may be so at local and global scales (2). Transfers from developed to developing countries for forest conservation may give rise to perverse incentives and are not easy to negotiate, monitor, and implement (3, 4). In this context, cost-effective conservation of tropical forests assumes importance.Tropical forests were largely nationalized during and after the colonial era, but over the past 2 decades, many governments, partly motivated by budgetary concerns, have been experimenting with decentralized management (5-8). Case studies suggest that community management of natural resources can be effective for sustainable use (8-10). However, because decentralization is often accompanied by political, economic, and ecological changes, its impact on forest conservation is hard to disentangle from that of confounding factors. A recent review of studies of the impact of decentralized management concluded that none of them identified the impact of decentralization on forest degradation (5).This article measures the effect of devolution of control of forests to village councils in the Indian central Himalayas on forest conservation and its cost. Forests in the region were nationalized early in the twentieth century. In 1930, approximately a decade after nationalization, and in response to widespread unrest, villages were permitted to carve out councilmanaged forests both from common lands not nationalized and from nationalized forests. The area under village council management has gradually expanded since then to cover approximately one-third of the forest area in the hill region of what is now the state of Uttarakhand.We use government data to find the cost per hectare of managing state forests and our survey data to find the cost per hectare of council forest management. We find that state forests cost at least 7 times as much per hectare to administer as do council-managed forests. Second, we compare the extent of degradation in state forests with that in council forests and find that the difference is small and not statistically significant. These findings are the basis for our conclusion that c...

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