Evaluating Environmental Programs: The Perspective of Modern Evaluation Research

By M. Frondel, Christoph M. Schmidt. Social Science Research Network, 2005

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Large-scale environmental programs generally commit substantial societal resources, making the evaluation of their actual effects on the relevant outcomes imperative. As the example of the subsidization of energy-saving appliances illustrates, much of the applied environmental economics literature has yet to confront the problem of proper attribution of effects to underlying causes on a convincing methodological basis. This paper argues that recent results in the econometrics and statistics literature on program evaluation could be utilized to advance considerably in this context. In particular, the construction of a credible counterfactual situation is at the heart of the formal statistical evaluation problem. Even when controlled experiments are not a viable option, appropriate approaches might succeed where traditional empirical strategies fail to uncover the effects of environmental interventions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0384bf0c37062198fe200b796bfde0d0f6e64c8f

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Citations in the corpus

Does eco-certification have environmental benefits? Organic coffee in Costa Rica (2012, methodology): “A variety of ex post statistical methods are available to overcome these problems including propensity score matching and instrumental variables (Ferraro, 2009; Frondel and Schmidt, 2005).”
The rebound effect: an assessment of the evidence for economy-wide energy savings from improved energy efficiency (2007, background): “This is the weakest evaluation strategy and prone to bias (Meyer, 1995; Frondel and Schmidt, 2005).”
Impacts of rural electrification in Rwanda (2011, background): “from substantial biases (see Frondel and Schmidt 2005, Ravallion 2007). As elaborated in Peters (2009), this applies as well to the case of electrification interventions, where it is the”
Evaluating the evaluations: Evidence from energy efficiency programmes in Germany and the UK (2013, unknown): “However, a substantial body of literature covering several decades of energy research suggests estimated savings in evaluations are often higher than actual, measured savings [14–26].”
Evaluation of biodiversity policy instruments: what works and what doesn't? (2012, unknown): “8 Gaveau et al. (2009), Sims (2010) and Honey-Roses et al.”
Barriers to industrial energy efficiency: a literature review (2011, unknown): “relatively rare (Frondel and Schmidt, 2001; Meyer, 1995; Sorrell, 2005; Train, 1994).”