Mychaela Paetow

This paper studies how transboundary pollution enters domestic politics. When air pollution crosses borders, citizens may observe local pollution without knowing whether the source is foreign or domestic, creating scope for politicians either to provide information or to shift blame abroad. We study South Korea, where fine-dust episodes are salient and pollution from China is a recurring focus of public debate. Combining source-specific pollution shocks with a politician-day panel of Facebook posts by South Korean legislators, we distinguish between environmental attention and explicit attribution to China. Instrumental-variables estimates provide little evidence that exogenous increases in local PM2.5 raise politicians’ broad environmental communication. By contrast, the clearest evidence consistent with strategic foreign attribution appears in partisan heterogeneity: conditional on discussing fine dust, conservative politicians increase foreign attribution in response to both transboundary and domestic shocks, whereas Democratic estimates are small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. Transboundary environmental problems thus affect politics through selective blame shifting rather than a uniform increase in foreign attribution.

Cities in developing countries are generating increasing volumes of solid waste, straining existing waste management systems. Open dumping and burning are common means of disposal, generating meaningful environmental and health externalities, especially in low-income communities and informal settlements. We partner with the Kampala Capital City Authority to test a new intervention designed to deter dumping: installing nets to catch household solid waste that would otherwise flow through rainwater drainage channels, causing flooding downstream. We are piloting a mechanism to elicit downhill households’ willingness-to-pay, and uphill households’ willingness-to-accept, to install nets along shared drainage channels, facilitating Coasean bargaining to realign private and social costs from improper waste management practices.

We study spatial misallocation in the context of urban mototaxi markets in Kampala, Uganda. Using high-resolution trip data from SafeBoda, Uganda’s leading ride-hailing platform, we document that drivers cluster in a small set of locations while many neighborhoods remain underserved—not because latent demand is low, but because low driver presence discourages ride requests, which in turn discourages drivers from exploring new areas. We argue this feedback loop traps the market in an inefficient equilibrium driven by imperfect information and high search costs on both sides. To test this, we implement a field experiment that provides drivers with real-time information about high-demand areas while notifying riders of nearby driver availability. We expect that coordinated interventions targeting both sides of the market can break the feedback loop and generate welfare gains exceeding those of one-sided approaches, with implications for platform-mediated labor markets in developing economies.

Can private markets deliver public goods in the presence of limited state capacity? We study this question in the context of private plastic recycling markets in Maharashtra, India. Informal recycling markets—in which households sell segregated plastic to local middlemen and aggregators—have grown substantially, yet little is known about where these markets emerge or how they interact with the public waste system. We combine ward-level data from the Swachh Survekshan Survey (2024) with a mapping of private plastic recycling operators across Maharashtra and an original survey of household-level plastic prices. Using a spatial model of household recycling decisions, we ask whether private recycling markets substitute for or complement state capacity, and estimate how access to private recyclers affects the flow of plastic waste to municipal landfills.