Jonathan T. Isham

Verified

Jonathan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Jonathan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Middlebury College

How can systemic changes in the international financial architecture accelerate the world's transition to clean energy and address the urgent challenges of the polycrisis? Building on extensive conversations within the Beyond Bretton Woods network, we present a series of causal relationships to diagnose the impairment if not hijacking of modern cap...

The civil rights movement-its training and much of its practice-was built around agape, the love depicted in Paul's letter to the Corinthians: the love that is patient and kind, that keeps no record of wrongs. A liberal arts education, according to environmental historian William Cronon, "nurtures human freedom in the service of human community, wh...

How Middlebury’s culture of collaborative, student-centric innovation lead to Energy2028, the phaseout of fossil fuel investments in the college endowment.

Summary Using cross-sectional household-level data from seven provincial towns and one district in Cambodia, we estimate both an access-to-water network equation and a water demand equation. We find that the connection elasticity with respect to the one-off initial connection fee is -0.39 and the price elasticity of water demand for the connected h...

As consolidation, deregulation, and technological advances transform the financial services industry, it is generally believed that community banks provide relationship-based banking services for small businesses, family farmers, and depositors of low to moderate wealth. Using data from actual loan applications to a rural community bank (not too di...

Objective. This article examines the role of relationship lending in the automobile loan market at a community development credit union (CDCU) and at a traditional community bank. Method. Data collected from actual car loan applications are used in a probit analysis to estimate the importance of selected demographic, financial, and loan-specific va...

Scholars who have studied local environmental groups in the United States have tended to agree about three related, stylized facts: that such groups are widespread, that they are pursuing a diverse set of activities, and, at least implicitly, that they are creating social capital that significantly affects environmental policy. However, a healthy s...

Without access to transportation, the welfare-to-work transition is nearly impossible, yet little is known about the effectiveness of programs designed to improve credit access. Since 1998, Vermont's TANF funds have provided automobile loans through the "Working Wheels" program. We use microlevel data from this program to explore how to cost-effect...

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop–based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base, such as oil and minerals) and plant...

We use actual loan applications submitted to a community development credit union (CDCU) and a traditional community bank to examine the role of relationship lending in the automobile loan market. We first show that the community bank relies upon credit scoring, not relationship lending; low-income households with poor credit histories are very unl...

Without access to transportation, the welfare-to-work transition is nearly impossible, yet little is known about the effectiveness of programs designed to improve credit access. Since 1998, Vermont's TANF funds have provided automobile loans through the “Working Wheels” program. We use microlevel data from this program to explore how to cost-effect...

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop--based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base, such as oil and minerals) and plan...

This chapter examines the social foundations of developing economies with different types of natural resource endowments. It argues that the nature of communities, institutions, and state-society relations has a significant impact on economic growth trajectories in general, and the management of shocks in particular. In developing countries, the ef...

As membership in traditional civic organizations declines in the United States (Putnam, 2000), could volunteering for nonprofit organizations be an alternative source of social capital formation? We use an updated household production framework (Becker, 1996) to theoretically connect volunteering with two forms of social capital: social connections...

Scholars who have studied local environmental groups and their effects in the United States have tended to agree about three related, stylized facts: that such groups are widespread, that they are pursuing a diverse set of activities, and, at least implicitly, that they are creating social capital that significantly affects environmental policy and...

By undertaking a census of all agricultural, outdoor recreational, and environmental groups (land-based groups) in two adjacent counties in Vermont, we demonstrate the dramatic increase of local environmental groups in the last 15 years. Building on the methodologies of Kempton et al. (2001), we first show that official lists of nonprofit groups-fr...

Using cross-sectional household-level data from seven provincial Cambodian towns, we estimate a water demand equation for households connected to the network, and provide an empirical measurement of the economic value of tap water connection. The use of a two-step econometric procedure allows us to analyse issues relating to household access to wat...

Increased transmission capacity and diminishing returns to scale in power production capacities have raised the opportunity cost of electricity in many countries. The resulting market changes have often been counteracted by policy, i.e. subsidized electricity prices to for instance energy intensive industries. Firm data, emphasizing cost heterogene...

this paper, we use data on economic rates of return (ERRs) from a set of 1,276 public and private investment projects to present new evidence on the importance of the policy environment for the productivity of investment projects. This unique data set has a number of advantages. It has a wide coverage across countries and over time; the indicator o...

We show that the length of compulsory education has a causal impact on regional labour mobility. The analysis is based on a quasi-exogenous staged Norwegian school reform, and register data on the whole population. Based on the results, we conclude that part of the US-Europe difference, as well as the European North-South difference in labour mobil...

Previously the role of social capital - defined as the institutions and networks of relationships between people, and the associated norms and values - in programs of poverty alleviation and development has risen to considerable prominence. Although development practitioners have long suspected that social capital does affect the efficiency and qua...

This paper develops a life cycle model for agricultural households in which social capital is a fixed input into household production. The intertemporal solutions of the model yield four results that are consistent with recent empirical and qualitative literature on social capital and consumption among agricultural households: commodity consumption...

Is public or private sector provision of water more likely to succeed in urban areas of Cambodia? Using quantitative and qualitative data from a range of surveys and technical assessments, this paper compares consumer satisfaction and technical performance of four private and four public utilities in Cambodia. The results indicate that households s...

Do the characterisitics of local social structures affect fertilizer adoption among rural households? This paper extends the model of technology adoption of Feder and Slade (1984) to incorporate social capital, and then tests the model with household data from two agro-ecological zones in rural Tanzania. Probit estimates of the model show that the...

Using data from community-based water services in Sri Lanka and India, this paper first shows that: (a) improved household health and reduced water collection times are associated with better service design and construction: (b) well-designed services involve more community members in the design process and final decision-making about service type;...

Do the characteristics of local social structures affect fertiliser adoption among rural households? This paper extends the model of technology adoption of Feder and Slade (1984) to incorporate social capital, and then tests the model with household data from two agro-ecological zones in rural Tanzania. Probit estimates of the model show that the p...

Press 2 Most rural villages in the Indonesian province of Central Java lack regular access to clean drinking water, and many face severe water shortages, particularly during the dry season. 1 The lack of clean water increases rates of sickness and death and reduces the time and resources available for productive activity, thereby diminishing well-b...

This paper develops and tests a model of technology adoption which predicts that the probability of adoption is increasing in household-level human capital and land endowments and village-level adoption patterns and social capital. The results of implementing the model with data from the plateau zone of Tanzania suggest that the probability of adop...

The World Bank is dedicated to the promotion of sustainable economic development and to poverty reduction throughout the developing world. It faces new challenges as capital shortages are replaced by large but volatile capital flows. The contributors to this volume argue that the Bank's greatest asset is its accumulated knowledge and experience of...

Using economic rates of return from World Bank-funded investments, we investigate how country characteristics and policies that influence aggregate performance affect investment productivity. Controlling for other characteristics, countries with undistorted (distorted) macroeconomic, exchange rate, trade, and pricing policies have highly productive...

This article uses a cross-national data set on the performance of government investment projects financed by the World Bank to examine the link between government efficacy and governance. It demonstrates a strong empirical link between civil liberties and the performance of government of projects. Even after controlling for other determinants of pe...

Using economic rates of return from more than 1,200 public and private sector projects implemented in 61 developing countries, the authors analyze determinants of investment productivity. Results from Tobit estimation demonstrate that the degree of countrywide policy distortions - macroeconomic, exchange rate, trade and pricing - critically affects...

Using data from the World Bank's Operations Evaluation Department, the authors examine the link between the performance of Bank-financed projects and various indicators of country governance. They find that: there is a strong statistical, and possibly casual, link between civil liberties and project performance. After controlling for a variety of d...

Data from 121 diverse rural water projects provide strong statistical findings that increasing beneficiary participation directly causes better project outcomes. Three possible econometric objections to these findings are addressed and answered. The subjective nature of the data does not preclude valid, cardinal measures of participation appropriat...

Development practitioners are coming to a consensus that participation by the intended beneficiaries improves project performance. But is there convincing evidence that this is true? Skeptics have three objections: 1)"Participation is not objective -- project rankings are subjective; 2) this subjectivity leads to"halo effects"; 3) better project pe...

Over the last decade, advocates of the interdisciplinary concept of social capital have celebrated the fact that elements of local social structures--embodied in social norms, networks and organizations--can significantly affect well-being in fishing communities. But does this concept bring anything to the study and practice of fisheries management...

Many oil- and mineral-rich countries have not fared well since the oil shock of the early 1970s. This paper tests the hypothesis that a developing country's natural resource endowment affects economic growth through its influence on socioeconomic and political institutions. The paper's thesis is that different export structures—whether foreign exch...

The evidence is irrefutable: global warming is real. While the debate continues about just how much damage spiking temperatures will wreak, we know the threat to our homes, health, and even way of life is dire. So why isn?t America doing anything? Where is the national campaign to stop this catastrophe? It may lie between the covers of this book. I...