Publications:

• Pagel, Jeffrey. "A natural resource curse: The unintended effects of gold mining on malaria." Ecological Economics 230 (2025): 108469. [Link]
• Pagel, Jeffrey, Ike Brannon, and Russ Kashian. "Jones Act: Protectionist policy in the twenty-first century." Maritime Economics and Logistics 21 (2019): 439-463. [Link]
• Kashian, Russell D., and Jeff Pagel. "Measuring X-efficiency in NCAA Division III athletics." Journal of Sports Economics 17.6 (2016): 558-577. [Link]

Policy Reports:     

• World Bank. 2025. Biodiversity for a Livable Planet: An Evaluation of World Bank Group Support for Biodiversity, Fiscal Years 2010-204. Independent Evaluation Group. Washington, DC: World Bank. [Link] [Short Summary] .

Working Papers:
More Than Just Carbon: The Socioeconomic Impact of Large-Scale Tree Planting (with Lorenzo Sileci and Charles Palmer)
Large-scale tree planting is a nature-based solution with the potential to jointly address environmental and poverty concerns. We examine the poverty effects of the National Greening Program (NGP), a major tree planting initiative in the Philippines, which directly and indirectly generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. Utilizing a dynamic difference-in-differences approach that leverages the staggered implementation of the NGP, we find significant and sizable reductions in poverty, measured via traditional and remotely-sensed indicators. Poverty reduction is channeled via shifts in local labor markets, decreasing agricultural employment while boosting unskilled labor and service sector jobs, and increasing incomes, consumption, and assets. The design of the NGP sustains poverty reduction over time, with payments and forest assets playing complementary roles. Payments to incentivize the establishment and maintenance of plantations produce temporary effects on poverty that gradually dissipate, but when combined with income-generating natural assets the NGP generates larger and more sustained reductions in poverty.

[Funded by: the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC); NERC/UKRI BIOADD Grant NE/X002292/1 and the LSE’s Global School of Sustainability]
[Working Paper and Media: Grantham Research Institute Working Paper; VoxDev; World Bank]

Mangrove Planting, Changing Fish Markets and Food Security (with Charles Palmer and Lorenzo Sileci)
Mangrove restoration is increasingly promoted as a nature-based solution to support both ecosystems and livelihoods. This paper examines how restoration affects fisheries and household wellbeing in the Philippines. We begin with a bioeconomic fisheries model, which suggests that restoration could increase fishing effort, catch, and income. A difference-in-differences strategy is applied to village- and household-level data, exploiting variation from a nationwide tree-planting initiative implemented between 2011 and 2018, restoring mangroves in a staggered manner across villages. Mangrove restoration is found to increase fishing activity, reflected in more vessels, greater capital investment, and expanded fishing effort, but had no impact on total catch. While fishing activity expands, restoration simultaneously leads to a short-term reduction in fishery productivity, with chlorophyll-a concentrations falling by 2–3 percent for approximately five years. These declines, combined with reduced access to nearshore waters, raise marginal fishing costs and drive up market prices despite stable catch volumes. Households respond by reducing fish consumption and substituting toward meat and eggs, particularly among the poor. These dietary shifts extend to non-fishing households and increase protein diversity. The results underscore how ecological restoration can reshape labour markets, food prices, and consumption patterns in resource-dependent communities.

[Funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC); NERC/UKRI BIOADD Grant NE/X002292/1 and the LSE’s Global School of Sustainability]
[Draft available upon request]

 Aid Against Trees? Evidence from a Community-Driven Development Program in the Philippines 
Community-driven development (CDD) programs are becoming integral components in the development portfolios of major international development agencies, and are further being positioned as a parallel strategy to the sustainable development goals relating to climate change mitigation and adaptation. As this dual positioning occurs, little is known about the environmental effects stemming from such programs, especially in terms of deforestation. Using satellite-generated forest coverage data, this paper aims to address this gap in the literature by examining the impact of CDD programs on deforestation. More specifically, I apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and a randomized control trial (RCT) to a large-scale CDD program over two different time periods in the Philippines. Eligible municipalities in the RDD period experienced an average of 236 percent more deforestation and treated municipalities in the RCT period experienced an average of 265 percent more deforestation than the control. I then explore heterogeneous effects on a detailed dataset of the subprojects to show that the greatest impact on deforestation arose from infrastructure subprojects, which include trails, bridges and roads, followed by support, education and health facility subprojects. As international development agencies continue to invest heavily in CDD programs, more focus should be placed on the sustainability of such programs and on how CDD programs can be more in line with forest conservation policy.

Multidimensional Energy Poverty: A Quasi-experimental Approach Applied to Education [submitted]
Energy is interconnected with the socio-economic and human development of the individual, but recent empirical studies have provided inconclusive evidence on the impact energy poverty has on well-being and the mechanisms involved. This empirical study has two main goals. First, it advances the literature’s understanding of energy poverty beyond singular dimensions, by performing a Factor Analysis to quantitatively characterize different types of energy deprivations an individual may experience. More specifically, a multidimensional energy poverty index is calculated for each individual to better illustrate the complementary input mechanisms. The second goal is to analyze how compounding energy deprivations affect different measures of education. This is carried out through an innovative instrumental variable (IV) strategy in the form of the household’s land gradient which is applied to data for rural households in Uganda. In this analysis I compare the effects of the multidimensional energy poverty index on different measures of education with those of access to electricity (the most common measure of energy poverty in the literature). The developed multidimensional framework provides a more robust tool for estimation through the precision of the estimated coefficients and smaller standard errors, along with the ability of the multidimensional energy poverty index to estimate significant results that access to electricity is unable to. The results demonstrate that there are other important energy mechanisms beyond access to electricity that must be considered within an individual’s set of energy capabilities, and this may explain the insignificant or inconsistent findings of previous studies based on simpler indicators (like access to electricity).

Selected Works in Progress:
Tree Planting, Land Use Change and Biodiversity (with Lorenzo Sileci and Charles Palmer) 
Pipeline Accidents and Poverty (with Miquel-Àngel Garciá-López)
Deforestation and a Nation-wide Titling Reform