Adaptation to climate change in Afghanistan: Evidence on the impact of external interventions

Climate change is a significant obstacle for farmers in the least developed countries like Afghanistan and adaptation support is exceptionally scarce. This paper provides evidence on the impact of the agriculture-related external support on farmers’ adaptation to climate change in the Central Highlands of Afghanistan. To this end, we collected primary data from 1434 farmers whom we interviewed across 14 districts in Bamiyan, Ghazni, and Diakundi provinces. We employ quasi-experimental econometric methods, including an endogenous switching regression analysis, to estimate the treatment effects on various adaptation-related outcomes. We find significant impacts of support interventions on the use of improved types of seeds and farmers’ access to irrigation water. Further impacts on the risk of flood, economic and financial as well as government and institutional adaptation constraints appear to be significant, but sensitive to the existence of unobserved factors. We conclude that farmers perceived changes in the climate, and most of them tried to adapt by employing measures available to them. The impact of external support has been partially effective in addressing immediate and short-term farming challenges related to climate change and extreme weather events. They, however, have not been effective in treating long-term fundamental climate change-related risks. Based on our analysis of the past treatments and farmers’ self-reported priorities, we provide a list of policy recommendations for adaptation to climate change in farming communities in Afghanistan

Akzeptanz und Effektivität kognitiver und moralischer Nudges

We discuss the results of a study on the acceptance and effectiveness of cognitive and moral nudges using defaults and social information as examples. Our study participants classify these two dimensions of nudges differently. In addition to the choice mechanisms of nudges, this article also focuses on differences in social and personal goals in which nudges are to be applied. Our result is that moral nudges are preferred for social goals, whereas cognitive nudges are preferred for personal goals. From this we derive important consequences for the use of nudges as policy measures. Our results show that cognitive nudges are considered more effective by our study participants than moral nudges. However, the acceptance of such nudges differs according to the goals

Truth-telling and the regulator. Experimental evidence from commercial fishermen

Understanding what determines the truth-telling of economic agents towards their regulator is of major economic importance from banking to the management of common-pool resources such as European fisheries. By enacting a discard-ban on unwanted fish-catches without increasing monitoring activities, the European Union (EU) depends on fishermen's truth-telling. Using a coin-tossing task in an artefactual mail field experiment with 120 German commercial fishermen, we test whether truth-telling in a baseline setting differs from behavior in two treatments that exploit fishermen's widespread ill-regard of their regulator, the EU. We find, first, that fishermen misreport coin tosses more strongly to their advantage in a treatment where they are faced with the EU flag, and, second, that misreporting is consistent with behavior in other hidden tasks. We also find some supportive evidence for our first result in a conceptual replication with 1200 UK citizens who voted ‘leave’ in the Brexit referendum. Our findings imply that lying is more extensive towards an ill-regarded regulator and that policy needs to account for this endogenously eroding honesty base

Community Aspirations and Cooperation: Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Role Models

This paper examines the hypothesis that cooperation depends on the aspirations that individuals hold for their community welfare and tests whether videos that depict either a successful example of collective action or living conditions in rural areas can shape community aspirations and increase cooperation among rural communities in Zambia. The results of a lab in the field experiment indicate that compared with the no video condition, unconditional contributions are higher in the video that presents village life while the collective action video does not affect cooperation. When both contributors watch the village life video, conditional contributions are also higher compared to the control treatment. This points to the importance of social norms in the evolution of collective action. We find that individual aspirations are significantly negatively related to the unconditional contribution decision, while community aspirations do not correlate with contribution levels